FEBRUARY 28, 2009 SATURDAY

We were up early and while I was getting ready, Elder Pine called so see if he and Elder Harris could do their combined study with us after the Stake Priesthood meeting. Diana told them yes. I left for Stake Priesthood meeting while Diana did her studying. She also made some brownies and went to the store to buy a 10 kg bag of potatoes so she had something to make lunch with. The Priesthood meeting was good and the main topic was the Oath and Covenant of the Priesthood. There were the usual youth speakers, a high councilor over the YM, the 1st Counselor in the Stk. Presidency and then the Stake President. Since the Stake covers areas into Germany, they also had the Stake Leadership meeting right after the general session. I wasn’t included in that one so I came home.

For lunch we fixed potatoes and chicken gravy, turkey steaks, corn, a green salad, rootbeer floats and brownies. This is the first time we tried turkey steaks; they were ok, but not the greatest although they cost enough. The gravy tasted good but was a little weird because I used tapioca powder as a thickener. It did thicken it , but it was a little stringy. I wish I could get the chicken bouillon out of the leftover gravy and some vanilla in and it would make a very good pudding. Oh well. The missionaries were an hour late in getting here because Elder Pine needed to go buy some new shoes so we didn’t get much studying done, well, none to be exact. By the time they ate lunch they had to run to the bahnhof to pick up an investigator to bring to the Church. I told him to take his old shoes with him, but when they left, we found his old shoes here for us to dispose of which didn’t make us really happy.

After they left we got our stuff together and traveled out to Maur by the Greifensee to find one of the lost sheep. The address we had took us to a restaurant right on the Geifensee. We asked a couple of workers if they rented any apartments in the top of the restaurant because normally that’s the case. This time it wasn’t. They didn’t know anybody by the name we gave them so it looks like this lost sheep will stay lost. We tried to interest the two workers in receiving a BM or hearing about the church, but they said they were satisfied with their lives the way they were. If they would only take the time to learn of the Restoration of the Gospel, they could be so much happier and have a purpose for living this life. The Lord wants to bless His children, but he won’t force anyone.

Today has been the best day as far as sunny and pretty warm that we’ve had this year. I didn’t have to wear my overcoat or my vest; it was just great. We waited for the bus and when it came, got on. We were going to stop to see if we could finally find Werner Buehlmann home, but we went sailing right past the bus stop. To stop the bus at a regular bus stop a button needs to be pressed. When someone presses the button and tone sounds. We thought someone else had pushed the button because we heard the tone, so we didn’t bother to push the button ourselves. We were mistaken and so we went on past. While we were on the bus, we received a test message from Suwang that she was really tired today and would we postpone coming to visit her until tomorrow. Therefore, we had some time freed up so we decided to continue on and go to the Salvation Army DI to find a white board that we need to practice our German with. We got off the bus, walked to the DI, but it was already closed. We walked back to a closer bus stop, got on the bus when it came, went to Schwamendingen, tried our debit card, didn’t work, went to Migros to buy a few things, they closed while we were in there, came back out and got on Tram #7 to go home. It was only 6:00 so we didn’t want to go home where good food would be tempting us to break our fast. We decided to ride around on the tram for awhile. While we were doing that, we practiced German vocabulary word as well as making sentences with the words that we were studying. Finally at 7:00 we’d had enough of that and came home. Reports, preparation for tomorrow’s correlation meeting, journals and reading some more took up the rest of the evening.