June 2, 2015

Warning: Long email!

Greetings from our little spot in paradise. The north shore of Oahu is indeed a beautiful place. We rarely have had a completely sunny day or a completely cloudy day. They are always partly partly…. Little, short rain showers followed by sun (and an increase in humidity). We’re supposedly headed into the busiest tourist time of the year and simultaneously into the warmest part of the year. The temperature itself doesn’t go up so much as the wind dies down and the humidity goes up. Clearly school is letting out in the US because the number of families showing up at the Visitors’ Center and the Polynesian Cultural Center has gone up dramatically. The visitors during the period between Easter and now have generally been couples or a few couples together in a group, but usually without school-aged children. That’s definitely changing.

Talking to the kids is a lot of fun. They’re always having a pretty good time and really enjoy the beach and snorkeling. Very few of them are having a bad day.

So what has our week been like the past week?

Sunday, May 24: We had the normal shift at the Visitor’s Center from 9am until 11:30am. Elder and Sister Priday, the Visitors’ Center Directors went to their Ward from 8am – 11am and then came over to the Center to relieve us. We then went back to the house so your mother could change out of her muumuu into normal Church clothes and then went to our Ward for meetings starting at noon until 3pm. This was also a special Fast Sunday for missionary work. Church was over at 3pm and we came back to the house, took off the tie, and spent quite a bit of time working with mother’s computer as she’s run out of disk space and needs to download the pictures from her iPhone.

Monday, May 25: Up at 6am to be at the Visitors’ Center by 7:15am for the weekly Visitors’ Center Training Meeting. The normal agenda for this meeting is:

• Opening Song
• Opening Prayer
• Recitation of one of a number of mottos, scriptures, or quotations. We’ve all memorized these and one of the sister missionaries is called on to extemporaneously pick one of these and lead the group in the recitation.
• Accountability report. The statistics from the previous week are put up on the white board and discussed. The statistics are in seven different categories with the most important one being the number of people who were baptized following their visit to the Center.
• Announcements. The Coordinating Sisters (two sister missionaries who are kind of like Zone Leaders for the Visitors’ Center) go through the announcements and reminders for the week. Today they also discussed the Theme for the next six weeks (“Thee lift me and I’ll lift thee and we’ll ascend together”) as well as the Christ-like attribute we will focus on for the next six weeks (“dilligence”).
• Training. There are two sister missionary companionships who are designated as trainers. Sometimes they do the training, sometimes the Coordinating Sisters do the training, sometimes the Senior Missionaries do the training (we’ll be doing the training on goal setting on Monday, June 15th) and sometimes Elder and Sister Priday do the training. Today the training was on the theme and building unity in a companionship.
• Remarks by Elder Priday, the Center Directory
• Closing Prayer

After the training meeting the plan was to take a group picture of all the missionaries at the Center. However, the training went long and we had to open up the Center at 9am before the training was completed. We had people waiting to get in, so the picture was postponed for a week.

We opened up the Center, then the three senior missionary couples, Elder and Sister Priday, Elder and Sister Jensen, and your mother and I had our monthly coordinating meeting. We talked about the things going on at the Center, the construction and maintenance schedules, and any issues that needed to be resolved.

Then we were back out in the Center. Your mother spends most of her time behind the front desk orchestrating everything going on inside the Center. I spend most of my time outside greeting guests, helping take pictures, and encouraging them to come inside the Center where the sister missionaries greet them and take them on a tour through the various exhibits. I had some great conversations with people from Dortmund, Germany, Melbourne, Australia, San Francisco, and Vancouver, British Columbia, as well as a lot of people from California, Washington, Utah, and Arizona. This was Memorial Day and we had a larger-than-normal visitor count because of the holiday.

Elder and Sister Jensen relieved us at 2:30 and we came back to the house. Laundry and some housecleaning followed, along with more work on the computer problem.

Tuesday, May 26th: Up at 6:30am to be at the Center by 8:45am. Your mother usually takes a walk from about 6 until 7:30 each morning. I make my breakfast, take a shower, do the dishes, and have my personal study time while she’s out taking a walk and posting pictures to Facebook.

On the mornings other than Monday (when we have the training meeting) we arrive at the center by 8:45 am. I unlock the door and turn off the alarm system. From there your mother and I get all the lights on and the systems running. We have a prayer meeting at 8:55am then your mother unlocks the doors and the day is underway. I then go out and walk the courtyard to pick up any trash that might be out there (the groundskeepers do a great job of keeping things clean).

The work crew redoing the tile in the fountain in the courtyard started their work this morning. That consisted of a couple of very loud machines chipping up the existing tile. It was more than a little noisy!

One interesting group came from Germany. One couple lived in the neighborhood where the Frankfort Temple is located and told me about the Temple, the open house, and how beautiful it is. Generally it was a very slow morning, probably because the day before had been a holiday and people were back to work and back to school.

Elder and Sister Jensen relieved us at 2:30pm and we came back to the house where I discovered that my blog had been hacked, again. I didn’t have time to do much about it as we had an assignment to take tickets at the Hale Aloha Luau at the Polynesian Cultural Center from 4:30pm until 6:30pm. We had close to 450 people come to the luau. It’s a lot of fun being there and greeting so many people having a very fun time. After the luau we had dinner from the buffet at the Prime Dining venue and came home. I spent the next several hours working the tech support at Bluehost.com to get the website restored and back functional again.

Wednesday, May 27: Up at 6:30, normal morning routine to be at the Center by 8:45am. The sister missionaries have their District Meetings on Wednesday mornings from 8am – 10am, so on Wednesday mornings your mother and I are the only ones there from 9am until the sister missionaries assigned to be there that morning are finished with their district meetings. The work crew was busy chipping the old tile out of the fountain pool. We had a pretty normal number of visitors for the day, including a large group from mainland China who took a tour of the grounds and the Center. We try to always have one of the sister missionaries who speak Chinese on duty at the center because the Chinese visitors always have a lot of questions, but almost never will talk in English to us. If we don’t have someone who speaks Chinese, they don’t stay very long at the Center.

Elder and Sister Priday relieved us at 2:30pm. Wednesday is Elder and Sister Jensen’s Preparation Day. We came home and cleaned house. Then I spent another considerable amount of time working the Bluehost.com and SiteLock getting some security set up on my blog so it (hopefully) won’t get hacked again.

Thursday, May 28: Thursdays are our scheduled Preparation Day during this six-week rotation. On July 1st we’ll swap schedules with Elder and Sister Jensen and they’ll have a Thursday Preparation Day and we’ll have a Wednesday Preparation Day.

I didn’t remember to bring my Social Security Card with me, and we’re not quite sure where it is back in the US, so while your mother cleaned and baked, I spent the entire morning driving down to Honolulu and back, waiting in line for security, and waiting in line at the Social Security office for a two-minute meeting with an agent to order a replacement card (the card arrived in the mail today). I need the card to get a BYU-Hawaii ID card as well as a Hawaii Residence Card. The BYU-H card lets us use the library and swimming pool. The Residence Card gets a number of significant discounts on things like gasoline.

After I got home I ironed my white shirts that had just been through the wash. We had Sister Kaufusi and Sister Latu over for dinner. We try to have at least one set of missionaries over each week for dinner so we can get to know them a bit better and they can get to know us. After dishes I finally got SiteLock properly configured so my blog is (hopefully) better protected.

Friday, May 29: I get up most mornings at 6:30am, except Mondays at 6 because of the training meeting, and occasionally at 6 on P-days if we need to go somewhere. The morning routine is almost always the same. On Friday and Saturday for this six week period we have the afternoon shift at the Center. This morning the tree maintenance people showed up and trimmed all of the tall palm trees around our little housing complex. It was quite the interesting process. I’ve attached a couple of pictures from the morning. DSCN150.jpg is a before picture, DSCN1521.jpg is the guy in the tree, and DSCN1526.jpg is the after picture. It made quite a difference.

We relieved Elder and Sister Jensen at the Center at 2:30. The afternoon shift has more sister missionaries than the morning shift, not only because we have more visitors in the afternoon, but also that between 3pm and 7pm every twenty minutes a tram (an open-sided bus) comes over from the Polynesian Cultural Center bringing people for a twenty-minute tour of the Visitors’ Center. Sister missionaries ride on the trams and do the color commentary as well as guide the tram guests through the Center. The trams bring a lot of visitors to the Center. I had the opportunity to visit with two different groups of visitors from Germany and give them a tour.

We close the center at 8pm and head back to the house for dinner and crash in bed. We’re dang tired when we get home from an afternoon shift at the Center!

Saturday, May 30: I had the normal morning routine. I spent some time building a new backup system for my blog so I don’t have to rely so much on the rather imperfect system that Bluehost offers. A couple of the bedrooms in the apartments the sister missionaries live in didn’t have working smoke detectors. The Mission Office sent up a couple of detectors for me to use so I installed them this morning. On the last week of the transfer period your mother and I do apartment inspections where I test all the smoke detectors and change the batteries where needed. Sister Kaufusi and Sister Latu brought their car over because the “low tire pressure” message was showing. All four tires were low. I have a good air compressor in the garage to use for the bicycle repair and for tires in general, so they went away with all four tires up-to-snuff. I’ve no idea how the tires get low!

We relieved Elder and Sister Jensen at 2:30pm for our shift at the Center. It was a very busy afternoon, one of the busiest since Spring Break. A highlight for me was a couple of fellows from Spain. We had a great conversation about living and visiting Spain vs visiting Hawaii. They were a lot of fun and seemed to be having a great time. It’s not all that unusual to have Europeans come as a couple of guys on vacation together or a couple of females on vacation together who are just good friends and travel different places together. In the case of these two guys, their wives weren’t interested in coming to Hawaii. They wanted to go to Malta … so the guys came here and their wives were vacationing together in Malta.

When we finally wrapped up at the Center at 8pm and had dinner, we were ready for bed.

Sunday, May 31: We had our normal 9am – 11:30am shift at the Center. Sundays at the Center are actually quite busy. Lots of members of the Church come to the Center on Sundays. We have two large theaters at the Center.. One theater seats 140 people and the other seats 85 people. Some of the Wards here in Laie will have special meetings on Sunday here at the Center because of the capability we have for audio/visual systems, stadium seating, and good Internet connectivity.

We had our normal Church services from noon to 3pm. Sacrament meeting was a farewell for the Bishop’s youngest son who is going to the Dallas, Texas Spanish Speaking mission. He gave a great talk and is definitely prepared to be a missionary. He’ll go the Mission Training Center in Mexico City for six weeks before going to Dallas, just like Kendra did before going to New York City.

After Church we took a drive to hopefully watch a sunset … we sat by the beach for quite a while but the clouds pretty much obscured the sunset. We learned later that the sunset behind the Temple was very nice. Laie is on the east side of the island. Sunset Beach is on the west side (about twenty minutes from here). Normally the best sunsets are at Sunset Beach, but not this day.

At the end of each month I send the car mileage into the Mission Office in Honolulu. We drove a total of 451 miles during the month of May. Gasoline here in Laie is about $3.289 / gallon. At Costco in Honolulu it’s $2.729, so I try to buy gas there whenever possible (like on Thursday on the way back from applying for a replacement social security card). So far we’ve been spending just under $50 a month for gasoline.

So, that’s a blow-by-blow for eight days of our mission. If you’ve gotten this far, congratulations! This is pretty much our standard routine! We’re having a great time and are happy to be here as missionaries.

Love,
father!

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