MISCELLANEOUS

 Dear Family, 

It's been another very busy week. Lots and lots of work. But it has been good work -- fascinating issues. So our pictures are just a bunch of miscellaneous things. Here we go.

This is our view of the swimming pool from our front room window.


Another "Be Real" photo of the subway on the way to work. It can get pretty crowded on the way to work. Everybody is on their phone.
We saw this woman on the cable car yesterday. She impressed me -- very elegant. So, I took her picture.


This is a picture of Cindy and Mom at our ping pong night. She showed up in this outfit she wore to go down to the sauna. She would not let me take her picture because she thought the outfit was silly. She is hiding her face with her ping pong paddle case.

Here we are  at a work lunch where we welcomed a new lawyer and his wife to work in the OGC. We were also saying goodbye to one of our support staff -- we were all so sad to see her go. You can see her in the small picture.



One more food picture. Believe it or not we found a great mexican restaurant and, of course, we had to try the fried ice cream. It was very good.

I go running every morning around 6:30 am. This was a beautiful morning with great light on the buildings across the harbor. So I grabbed a picture (or I should say I got someone near by to grab the picture for me).


This is AJ's mission president and his wife, the Andersons. They invited us up to their house last night for dinner and an evening of cards. Mom did well. I got thumped.


This is us singing today at church. Our hymnal is in english and chinese (with both the characters and romanization). The romanization allows us to sing along with everyone else.




Cindy came over for dinner tonight. After we ate (and she finished washing the dishes which she insisted on doing) she peppered us with question after question about us, our family, and religion. We feel not so much like missionaries but more like information givers (teachers) who are filling this never-ending fountain of questions. She is very bright. She wants to start reading the BM together several nights a week. 


I thought you'd get a kick out of this. We talked to Cindy a week ago about commandments and how they are meant to bless and protect us. She sent this to us after a party on the beach.

Well, time to go. We love and miss you all. Have a great week. Love, Mom and Dad, Grandma and Pampa


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Diquattro Time

Image
Dear Family, It has been another whirlwind of a week. Or more acurately, two weeks. We met up with the Carli, Jeremy, Miles, and Penny almost two weeks ago in Thailand for just a day, after which they took off for Phuket and we stayed in Bangkok for Char's temple seminar with 30 return missionaries. (That week is covered in detail in Char's letter.)  We returned home a week ago, Sunday night, at the same time that the Diquattros arrived from Thailand. So we met each other at the baggage claim in the airport Sunday night around 11pm and took two taxis home and moved in (all of us) into our apartment. These first two pictures are from our day in Bangkok together. We visited a market, did some elephant riding and toured the canal markets by boat. I included just a couple of pictures from that day.  Here, Miles is making friends with the local snake. And here we have Jeremy and Carli aboard an elephant. Monday morning, we were happy to hit the streets with Penny. First stop was ou...
Read more

One Final Thought

Image
One final thought. By now, the temple theme to our mission is clear, so bear with me for a wrap up and one more story.  As members of the church we often hear our apostles and prophets talk about "the gathering of Israel" and  the purpose of temples in that pursuit. I believe all that to be true and important, but I have come to believe that regular attendance at the temple also offers another kind of gathering. I have come to believe that temples are also sacred gathering places for those of us on this side of the veil. Scattered through this last 18 months of letters has been stories of our "random" and unexpected temple meetings with beloved missionaries and meeting Cindy without a plan. Remember our story on January 14th titled "The Dream that I Hadn't Even Thought Of? when against all odds we "bumped" into Sister Thi at the crowded mall food court?  A month or two after that meeting I found this post on her Facebook page: Returning home nearl...
Read more

Second to Last Week

Image
 Dear Family, We moved out of our office Friday night, packed and cleaned yesterday and just took all of our suit cases over to the office to wait for our return from Bangkok. We leave for Bangkok early tomorrow morning for Mom's last temple seminar. She has fifty kids coming this time she is pretty stressed with all the work it takes to put this together and then execute next week. We have to get up early to catch our plane to Bangkok so this will be pretty brief. A week ago we got a tremendous surprise. I've been working on getting a meeting with the Cambodian Ministry of Cult and Religion in connection with our offer to help the Ministry draft their new Freedom of Religion law. I delivered a model of the law to the Ministry a year ago and have been requesting a meeting ever since. Well, out of the blue last week I got a call (on Tuesday afternoon) that they would like to meet with me on Friday. So we quickly got a flight scheduled and left Thursday morning. The meeting was v...
Read more