My walk this morning (1st two photos); 3rd photo is of the stairs we had to go down to get home today.

FEBRUARY 5, 2010 FRIDAY

This morning I was up by 7:00 and went out to take my walk. We had an appointment with Dorothea Jaermann for lunch so my goal was to find her address so we would know exactly where it was. I didn’t bother to look it up on the computer because I knew it was somewhere up the hill above us. It’s kind of fun just taking off in a direction and seeing what one can find. This time I was lucky and walked right to the street, Spiegelgutstrasse, and found her apartment without any trouble. I walked on past, across the road and into the woods on the other side. They were doing some logging somewhere and the paths we blocked to keep people out. There was a snow covered road, however, above and inside the trees that paralleled the street. I walked along it until it came back out and down the hill and then I had to climb the fence, cross the freeway, climb the other fence to get to where I could walk back toward home. All in all it was a good walk.

We transferred the February birthdays into our planner so that we wouldn’t forget anyone and then looked up the addresses and made sure we wrote down the bus number and bus stop name so we’d know how to get to each one. Diana also tried to call Sylvain to check on him and to report her progress, but he didn’t answer the phone. She left an encouraging message on his answer machine. That done we got ready for our lunch appointment and left to go there.

Dorothea is an older lady who has never been married and lives alone. She greeted us very warmly and, since she had everything ready, invited us to sit at the table. First, she served us a green salad followed by a dish of tuna fish balls (looked like meatballs only made with tuna fish) that were surprisingly delicious, a side dish made with ground popcorn (also very good) and some different colored sauteed sweet peppers. Everyone knows Diana is trying to not eat any sweets or sugar and they are very careful to not use it in their cooking. For dessert she offered us fresh fruit; grapes, pears, bananas and apples. During our discussion we found out she is blind in one eye and has the possibility to lose vision in the other eye as well. She bumped her glass of water over which didn’t disturb her too much. She said she often does that because of her blind eye. She says she has MS and a few years ago she had some kind of a stroke that has affected some parts of her brain, such as the part where mathematics is learned. She takes these things in stride and is a very happy and faithful person. She laughed often and when she did, she kind of made an endearing snorting sound along with it. The unhappy part of this visit was that she told us about some problems between some members in the ward. She felt we ought to know, not to gossip, but to enlist our help in trying to resolve some of the conflict. It’s hard to understand why in such a small branch there has to be conflict. We’ll just love them all and hope we can be of help in some way. It was amazing how four hours just slipped away.

As we got ready to go I noticed my wallet wasn’t in my back pocket. Now what were we supposed to do? Our bus passes are in the wallet and, if we rode the bus and we caught without our passes, we’d each get an $80 fine. We hoped I’d just left it home because we had other stuff in there as well including a debit card and money. Since it was all downhill to our apartment, Diana decided we’d try to walk home, in the rain of course, relying on me to know the way. I got a little confused in a place or two, but in the end without too much trouble, we made it back home okay. And yes, my wallet was sitting on the desk, right where I had left it.

It was raining and it was too late in the evening anyway to try and do other visits so we read, looked at emails and then did some research on the internet to find some learning English reading websites for our meeting with Kofi tomorrow at 5:30. Sylvian returned Diana’s called tonight and reported that he was still stone cold sober. That was good news. Diana has also kept her part of the bargain in not eating any sugar or goodies. It hasn’t helped her lose any weight, however.

A tender mercy is that my wallet was sitting home and not lost on the bus. Another is that we weren’t checked for our pass. Another is that Sylvain is still sober and seems happy.