Today's cake. It has written on it, "Ja wohl missions Arbeit." (You betcha, missionary work).
The other two photos are from the boat; we have vineyards up here, too, although not as big and not as many.

JUNE 29, 2010 TUESDAY

District meeting was this morning at 10:30 so we were up to get everything ready for the lunch. Diana made the jello salad and got all of the stuff ready for the burgers and hotdogs (cheese, catsup, mustard, onions, tomato slices, lettuce and etc). Today was our July 4th celebration. She also gets everything ready to set the table so it takes less time when the meeting is over. I got the hamburger patties fried and the cervalets (fat hotdogs) placed on the rack in the oven to grill later on. We also cooked seashell macaroni for macaroni salad. We had leftover chicken salad from last week (we froze it) that we unthawed for it. So everything was ready when the elders got here at the appointed time.

This was the first meeting under the direction of our new district leader, Elder Neuffer. He had everything well organized, but did things a little different than Elder Bentley. We started with a song and prayer and then Diana was asked to do her mission rules book tip first. She made it into a game and it was fun for the elders and they learned some things along the way. She asked questions out of the rule book and each companionship got points if both elders wrote down the same answer. Elders Neuffer and Dahneke wrote the same answer six out of seven times, but Elders Sills & Bushnell matched only one out of seven times. One thing that will be different is that each week he will choose one elder to spotlight. Each missionary will take two pieces of paper and write something about the person and then fold it up and give them to him to read out loud. Today was Elder Sills turn and he got both serious and silly comments, but on the whole, it was an interesting exercise. At the end of the meeting he asked each one to bear his/her testimony which was a nice addition to our meeting.

As usual we cooked too many hamburgers (12) and hotdogs (14), made too much macaroni salad for only six of us. We shouldn’t have made the cake either although a few of them ate small pieces. Now what are we going to do with the leftovers? We’ll probably take some to Paul tomorrow and maybe the macaroni salad will still be good enough to take to the baptism Saturday. The elders left just before 2:00, Elders Neuffer & Dahneke to go to the zone council at the church here in Schaffhausen, and Elders Sills & Bushnell to go back to Singen. About 4:30 Elder Neuffer brought our chapel key back which was a relief. We hate to lend our key because we never know if or when we’ll get it back. We’ve had to track our key down more than once in the past.

By the time we were done cleaning everything up we needed a little recovery time. This morning we didn’t have time to read our scriptures so we did that this afternoon. Later on we did some phone contacting and actually got in contact with Roger Ojingia and Jasmin Hunsiker. Roger said he was watching a soccer game and didn’t have time to talk to us. He talked to us long enough to hear us invite him to come to Church Sunday. He said he would. We tried calling Jasmin, but she didn’t anser her home phone nor her cell phone. We sent her a text message asking her if she were still alive, because we hadn’t heard from her for such a long time. Surprisingly, she answered back and said she’s working much more now and that her four year old son had had scarlet fever, but everything was okay now. She promised to call us on Friday so we can make an appointment with her. She and her three children are such a good family that we hope we can continue teaching them. We called a few other people, but got no answers. We looked through old progress reports and wrote down about a dozen likely looking prospects and we’ll set out tomorrow to contact some of them. And that seems to be it for today.

Roxsan called on skype last night too late to include it in yesterday’s journal entry. She explained the problem with our boat and what they were doing to get it fixed. It seems the impeller that runs the cooling system got burned up which caused the motor to overheat. No one was aware of what the problem was so they took it in to Reinell to get it looked at. It was a simple fix, if one knows how to do it. I burned the impeller up once myself and had to repair it, so if I had of been home, I could have done it. Since it was in the shop already, we asked her to have them do a complete check-up on it so we wouldn’t have to worry about it later. She also told us she had posted a new video of Truxtn on her blog so we’d look at it when we hung up. We told her we’d seen the one of Mayleah singing a song with her school class. She was really cute and very active in doing the movements the song called for. It’s always good to get the latest news on our kids and grandkids and the happenings at home.