September 27, 2015
Greetings all from a very wet, windy, rainy Laie, Hawaii. Another hurricane is making it’s way to the south and west of the Islands today and the fringes are passing through the area. We’ve been dodging drenching rain storms most of the day today. We didn’t even put the flags up at the Visitors’ Center because of the weather!
So what is a day like for me over here? Yesterday (Saturday) was a pretty typical day.
As on most days my alarm went off at 6:30 am and I got up, shaved, and showered. Sister Smith was out taking her morning walk. The weather has gotten much cooler and less humid, so I opened up the windows and front door to let the breezes through. I made my breakfast (oatmeal, one piece of toast with butter, and a glass of 1% milk) and worked on my scripture project while I ate breakfast. I’m busy working through the Book of Mormon transferring all of my notes and cross references into the LDS Scriptures application on my iPad. Yesterday I worked through Helaman 13-15.
Sister Smith got back home while I was eating breakfast and made her breakfast (rice with other vegetables). I did the dishes and we both got ready to leave to go to the Visitors’ Center.
At 8:35 am we had prayer (it was Sister Smith’s day, I do the praying on odd days and she does it on even days) and drove over to the Center. The building’s alarm system was already disabled because a computer guy (very competent fellow) from Salt Lake was there finishing up the upgrades to our audio/visual systems. Sister Smith did her open-the-Center routine and I did mine. My tasks included getting all of the lights on in the bathrooms, front area, Temple Corner, starting “God’s Plan for Families” display (it never works right the first time through so we do a run of the display before anyone comes in). We then had prayer meeting at 8:55am. Since it was her day, Sister Smith was in charge of the prayer meeting.
Sister Smith unlocked the front doors (all eight of them) at 9am and I took four sister missionaries with me out to the flagpole and we put up the American and Hawaiian flags. They only went up to half-mast in honor of Elder Scott, the Apostle that died last week. After that I set up my computer in the Director’s office and finished up writing a Python program.
The upgrade to the audio/visual system included a number of new videos as well as the deletion of several old videos from the system. We can play these videos in either of two large theaters or in either of two smaller teaching rooms. The LDS Church computer guy sent me an XML file that had the needed information and I wrote a small Python script to extract the name of the video, the length of the video, and what subtitles were available and printed that out so we can show guests what videos are available.
The morning shift goes from 9am until 2:30pm. I finished up the program and printed out the lists by about 11am. Then I spent a little over an hour with the computer guy going over everything he had done and getting all of his last-minute instructions. He left to go to the Honolulu Airport to fly back home and Sister Smith and I had our lunch. The rest of the shift I visited with some of the guests who came into the Center.
We came home at 2:30pm. Sister Smith changed clothes and started making some blueberry muffins for dinner while I went to Foodland (the local grocery store) to get some sour cream for the paprika chicken stroganoff we were going to have for dinner.
We left the house at 4:15pm to go to the Polynesian Cultural Center where we had an assignment to take tickets at the Hale Aloha Luau. That meant we both changed clothes before leaving into our matching “aloha” attire. We have different badges for the Polynesian Cultural Center, so we leave our missionary name tags home and use the PCC badges. We got to the luau location about 4:25pm and people were already lining up for dinner. The luau was expecting about 530 people for dinner and the show. The luau opened at 4:45pm and the next 45 minutes was pure bedlam as people came in droves for the luau and show. At one point the lady in charge was concerned that she was running out of places for people to sit because the luau was oversold. Somehow she solved the problem, though. We did have to take about ten people over to the other luau at Hale Ohana, and that used up all of their seats. The two luaus are identical, they’re just supposed to be balanced, which for some reason didn’t happen this day.
We stay at our post taking tickets until 6:20pm. The last 45 minutes is pretty quiet, although a few people show up for dinner when everything is just about over. I don’t understand that … they’ve paid pretty good money to be there! The other thing I don’t understand is how many people leave the luau before the program is finished! The program usually ends with a fireknife dancer which is pretty spectacular and those who leave early don’t get to see it.
Usually after we’re done taking tickets we go over to the Prime Dining venue to have a free meal. But this time we had a set of sister missionaries coming over for dinner at 8pm so we left the PCC and went home.
Sister Smith finished preparing the meal and I set up the table, chairs, and place settings. The missionaries arrived at 8:15pm for dinner, Sister Yau from Hong Kong and Sister Latu from Utah (she grew up in the Tongan community in Salt Lake and speaks Tongan) are fun missionaries and we had a nice dinner with them. At 9:15pm they headed home, Sister Smith did the dishes while I put everything else away. At 10:00pm I was finally ready for bed. We had prayers and I crashed. Sister Smith came to bed sometime … I don’t know when. I was out for the count!
My goodness, it took almost as long to write this as it did to do it! But that’s actually a pretty typical day that starts at 6:30am and ends at 10pm. Except, that between those two times things are seldom typical. For instance, next week on Monday morning at 7am we’ll tune into and show Elder Scott’s funeral live from the Tabernacle in Salt Lake City. Tuesday morning at 7:30am will be our weekly training meeting followed by driving to Honolulu for a doctor’s appointment. Saturday and Sunday will be General Conference at 6am and 10am, which we’ll show in one of the theaters for all of the Visitors’ Center missionaries. We’ll have a PCC assignment sometime later in the week, I don’t remember the date.
We have no problem staying busy nor figuring out what to do with our time! We’re having a very good mission!
I hope that your week goes well. ’til next week!
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