Hey Fam,  Greetings from the last frontier, as they say…

It’s been a busy week for us here—we’re still trying to get settled in our home we will be living in for a year.  All of our “fixes” we just ask the question, can we do it like this for  a year or is it worth it for a year.  You can guess my answer most of the time. For example, the bathroom situation.  There is one full bath upstairs, with no counter space at all, no drawers either.  Our stuff just didn’t fit…not even for one person.  So in the downstairs bathroom, it has one of those shelf things over the toilet.  So we bought one from Walmart for $20 to put upstairs.  It is nice, but still only fit her stuff.  So I moved to the downstairs ¾ bathroom and now we both have enough room and the small shower with my own space is worth going up and down the stairs every morning.  Its colder down there, so I am just fine with it.  We put up blackout curtains in the family room, because we have two streetlights right outside that are on eye level with our windows.  The blinds didn’t cut it, so now we can block that light.  Just stuff like that that keeps us from feeling settled.  But we are close…only a few bulbs I have to change to bright, bright, bright bulbs.  When they are all on, it looks pretty bright in here and we will get to leave them all on all the time we are here shortly.

Conference has been really good, but it feels a little sad without Pres Nelson there, but he is 99 yrs old, so we’ll cut him some slack.  But wow, 20 new temples and Alaska scores one of them in Fairbanks.  That is 5 hours from Anchorage and there are two stakes up there I believe.  There is joy here over that. 

We had a trio of Spanish speaking Elders over for the last session and for dinner after.  Two of them were from Spanish Fork and one of them knew Kaley.  It was fun and they loved being here.  Kind of a relief for them  to be with grandparents... :).

I taught my first Institute class this week and it went ok.  It was nice to have prep time on the clock, so to speak.  It was the small class and there were like 15 or so there, but 7 were missionaries.  But it was good to get it done so I feel more comfortable.  Our leader, Justin Reeder just told us that he needs us to substitute his seminary classes for the month of November and his Institute classes.  That is a little daunting.  They have released time here so it is during the day which is much better that early morning.  Mom is going to take one class & I will take 2.  We’ll help each other If needed. 

 

When we go to church up here, it is so amazing that the church is the same everywhere.  Just in Anchorage, there are wards or branches or groups that speak the following languages:

Samoan

Tongan

Spanish

Hmong

Philippino

Korean

Japanese.

Pretty amazing in one city, that many members to organize.  And Sacrament meeting is just the same, Come Follow Me study is just the same, the organization is the same. 

With the technology that we have now, it is much easier to keep it al together.  But think of  Lehi, taking his family with no permanent written documents that would be able to keep their language and learning.  To go back and get the brass plates was so critical in so many ways including maintaining the consistent word of God.  I hope you all enjoyed that story and learned so many lessons from it.

 

We are loving what we are doing.  We went we went to our first zone conference.  It was actually a mission conference.  The President went to the North Pole Zone and we all zoomed in.  We were in the North Stake House with all the Anchorage missionaries.  It was an excellent conference and we were pretty amazed with the missionary leaders, both the boys and the girls. 

This coming week is our first full week where we will need to plan our week and determine how we attack our responsibility.  Up till now our time has been filled for us.  We are excited about it.

 It has been mostly sunny since we got here.  Its been a glorious fall, and apparently an unusual one, with more sunshine than usual.  We have taken advantage of it as much as we can by being outside and going on walks in new places.  Lake Taku, Bi-Centennial Preserve, Campbell Crik and others.  It’s been fun and enjoyable to be outside. 

 

We love you all…Adioooooooos.