Diana & Charlotte sitting on the bench at Spiez waiting for our train; Swiss like cows and sell them everywhere for souvenirs; overlooking Spiez.



video from bus leaving Grosse Scheidegg and going towards Grindelwald.

JULY 17, 2009 FRIDAY

For Priscilla’s baptism Sunday afternoon Diana has been asked to give her testimony and I’ve been asked to be a witness. We also volunteered to give the lesson in family home evening next Monday evening. Today we felt we needed to work on our assignments so we’ll be sure to be ready when the time comes; it’s so easy to put things off and then things come up when you least expect them and bingo, the time for preparation is past. Diana wrote her testimony out in English and then translated it into German. I helped her polish it up a bit, but she did a pretty good job on her own. Our lesson for FHE is going to be on the parable of the ten virgins using the painting by Gayla Prince and the written description of it’s meaning. Rather than try and translate the written text myself, I found a translation program and downloaded it onto my computer. The program helped a lot but, as anyone knows who has used such a program, there’s still a lot of work to do to make it right. I only got about half of it done today and I hope to finish it tomorrow. Later on while I was still working on my translation, Diana called Suke Ehrensperger and Gabriella Rodriquez to see how they were doing. Suki hadn’t been to Church for several weeks and also didn’t answer her phone when we tried to call before. Today she answered and Diana was able to talk to her for awhile. She said she has been depressed and didn’t want to come to Church and have to act happy. Diana is good to cheer people up and we’re hoping she’ll come this Sunday and also to the baptism. Daniella said she has been busy with her kids and didn’t feel like coming, but Diana told her we’ll see her in Church Sunday and invited her to the baptism too. We hope she comes. We also texted Neide a “hello, how are you,” but she didn’t answer back.

Elder Norris called this afternoon to give us our district meeting assignment which is to bring the treats, only this time “treats” means to bring lunch for everyone. This is the last meeting before transfers and so it’s the “Omega” district meeting. It’s mostly a normal meeting, but it will last a little longer and have some special things added depending on what the district leader can think up and plan. This transfer Elder Jensen is going to Germany and Elder Richardson is coming to take his place and he and Elder Pine will be the assistants to Pres. Matern. Elder Norris, our current district leader, is also being transferred to Germany and so this next meeting is his last one here. His companion, Elder Carrier, will be getting a brand new “Golden” who arrives in the mission next Thursday and he’ll also be our new district leader. Everyone else stays put. We told Elder Norris we’d cook his favorite food for lunch, but he has trouble making snap decisions so he said he’d let us know tomorrow what he wanted.

Elder Pine called and asked if he and Elder Jensen could come over about 2:30 (they didn’t show up until 3:30) to do their weekly planning with us. In code that meant they’d like to come over and hope we’d feed them something. They arrived and went right to work with their planning and Diana went right to work cooking them lunch or dinner, or is that linner? At any rate they got hamburgers, wieners, left over macaroni salad and root beer. We had to leave, before they got finished with their planning, to visit our birthday people for today, Charles Aboussou and Gerde Schroeder. Charles is less-active and we were hoping to catch him home. It was raining heavily and we thought everyone should be home, but he wasn’t. We left his gift sitting by his door. We expected Gerde to be home, but she wasn’t either. Her mother, who lives close by, said she never goes anywhere and we were hoping to cheer her up. By the time we got home we were somewhat wet, but this time I wore my raincoat and the umbrella mostly protected Diana. Still, it’s impossible to stay dry.

About 8:30 Elders Harris and Nilsson dropped by to get some help finishing up some details in planning Priscilla’s baptismal service. They needed the computer to download some music for a musical number they hope someone will sing. They also made a couple of phone calls to the ward mission leader and someone else. All in all it’s been a pretty good day.