Tropical Storm Darby is making its way through the Hawaiian Islands today through tomorrow. It didn’t become strong enough to be called a hurricane; it only got up to maximum winds of about 40mph. But, it carried plenty of moisture with it as it came through Oahu today! As of right now the center of the storm is about 70 miles northwest of Laie headed straight for the Island of Kua’i. It should pass across that island by Monday afternoon.

Last year there were five hurricanes in the central Pacific around the Hawaiian Islands with none of them coming very close. That was considered to be a very active hurricane season. This year, because the El Niño has subsided, is supposed to be less active. A full-blown hurricane hasn’t made landfall in Hawaii for more than twenty years.

One thing that every missionary at the Visitors’ Center becomes very proficient at is taking pictures of the visitors. Most want their picture taken in front of the Christus statue in the Center. Many Church members also want their pictures taken out on the courtyard with the Temple in the background. Very often someone will come into the Center and ask if someone can come out to take a picture.

Today we had a very large group in the Visitors’ Center. They came in this morning to have a group picture taken in front of the Christus. Their family originated in the Cook Islands and are now scattered around the Pacific and the mainland. This year they held their periodic reunion in Laie and more than 130 family members were in attendance. Elder Andrus and his wife were on duty when they came in and he spent about a half hour taking pictures with various cameras. Just about everyone there who had a camera or smart phone wanted a family picture taken with their own device. By the time the were finished, some of the children were mighty happy to be done sitting on the floor!

One of the Williams family members came over to the front desk where I was standing. He asked me if I knew why their homeland was called the Cook Islands. I answered that I thought it was because Captain James Cook had “discovered” the islands and made them known to the world (while James Cook did indeed land in the Cook Islands, he wasn’t the first and didn’t claim the islands, I’ve since learned). He replied, “Well, that’s one story. However, my story is that we were the first of the civilized Pacific Islands in that we cooked our people first before we ate them!” That’s his story and he’s sticking to it. Wish I’d gotten his name!

‘Til next time! Ta ta for now.

We arrived in Laie on our mission on March 19, 2015 … sixteen months ago today. All of the clichés about time apply abundantly!

Earlier today I had a conversation with a fellow from Wellington, New Zealand. He’s a less-active member (“not-yet-converted member”, said his wife of one year … second marriage for them both) of the Church waiting for his wife to do a session at the Laie Hawaii Temple. He has a small software company in Wellington doing telephone-related software for large companies and government entities that need customization for their phone systems. We had a great technical conversation. This is the first time since we’ve been here that I’ve had any kind of a deep technical discussion related to software, database design, and development methodologies. It was quite a lot of fun, and for him as well.

Then our discussion turned to doctrine. He had a number of questions where what he understood from science doesn’t seem to fit very well with what Church members tell him is “the truth”. The discussion centered around the scientific concept of entropy and the 2nd law of thermodynamics… that over time entropy always increases and eventually devolves into equilibrium. Simply stated, the 2nd law posits that this universe where we currently reside must eventually cease. He wondered how that fits with the Church’s teaching that we have no beginning and have no end. I’ve given a lot of thought to the concept of time, such as why does time go forward? It isn’t constant, so what are the real attributes of time? Theoretical physicists like Stephen Hawking have put a lot of attention to this subject and there is much more unknown than is understood. I explained to him what I currently think related to his question.

That is, that “time” exists only in our current estate. We have another estate where time doesn’t exist and we left that estate to come here where we became subject to a lot of physical laws, such as time, that were not part of the previous estate. At some time we’ll cease to live in this estate and will eventually (perhaps at resurrection) return to our previous estate. And, because time is a part of this estate, entropy is increasing, and this estate will eventually cease to exist as energy equilibrium is reached. To me, that’s consistent with what we teach and believe. Now, what I’ve just written may or may not be completely true, but in general it seems to fit. He hadn’t thought of time in that way, and left with a lot more to think about and ponder.

His wife came into the Center after finishing her session at the Temple and asked about Kolob in relation to what her husband and I had been talking about. Abraham 3 talks about Kolob being the place near to where God is. I suggested that “where God is” would be the estate from which we descended and where we will eventually return. It would be “outside” this estate. So, to me Kolob being “near to God” probably means “near in time”. What if, I suggested, Kolob were the first “thing” that emerged from the Big Bang (given that theory is correct), then Kolob would be nearer in time to God than anything else. It’s kind of a wild idea, but it makes sense to me given what little I know and how much is unknown.

They left having made a commitment to rethink some of the science in terms of an eternal God and us as eternal beings, to first assume that is true and then work through the implications. I told him he’d find that there is much more commonality and agreement between Mormanism and science than any other religious belief system. I hope that’ll make a difference for him and his activity in the Church. Who knows … someday we may get to Wellington, New Zealand and meet again!

In six and a half months our mission will become history. At this moment, that seems to be far too soon.

Aunt LaRella’s funeral and burial was today. I read in Twitter that there was a massive power outage in southeastern Idaho and western Wyoming. I hope that didn’t impact the funeral and burial. A number of years ago I attended my Aunt June’s funeral in Tooele, Utah. Just before the funeral, the city cut the power to that entire part of town because of a transformer problem. That meant no lights in the chapel, no organ, no microphone system. The funeral went forward, though. A fellow brought a generator over in the back of his pickup to make the sound system work and get a few lights working in the chapel (which had no windows). It all worked out in the end.

‘Til next time … ta ta for now.

Aunt LaRella passed away Monday, July 11th after being in a skilled nursing facility for several years with severe dementia. She was Nathan LeRoy and Mary Burton Smith’s only daughter and my father’s only sister. She was born in the old farmhouse in Cleveland, Idaho (a place that no longer exists) on September 18, 1929. My grandfather (her father) was the midwife. Aunt LaRella said of her birth, that it was in the upstairs master bedroom in the middle of the night and somewhat earlier than expected. When grandfather delivered the baby before the umbilical cord was cut, grandmother saw it was a girl, “We’ve got a girl, Roy!” she exclaimed. “Don’t let her die! Don’t let her die!” She lived to be 86. When she was old enough to go to school, grandmother moved into town so Aunt LaRella could attend school in town. The town? Preston, Idaho, population 1,500 at that time.

Her funeral will be this coming Monday in Preston and she’ll be buried next to her husband, my uncle Ted Larsen, who passed away a couple of years ago.

My favorite memory of Aunt LaRella was about twenty years ago when we were all at the Cleveland Cemetery for a burial. I don’t remember who. But after the grave dedication, Aunt LaRella took several of us, including some of my teenaged children on a tour of the back side of the cemetery where the previous generation of Smith’s are buried and regaled us with stories about our ancestors. I don’t remember most of those stories now, but that was kind of the awakening of thinking about family and our family heritage. Rest in Peace, Aunt LaRella. You’re now in a much better place!

Today is our Preparation day. We’re taking it a bit easy this afternoon and evening after making a trip into Honolulu this morning to the Hawaii Honolulu Mission Office to pick up several cases of Simplified Chinese Books of Mormon and doing a little shopping at Walmart. We’re both quite tired! We’ve had a very busy week with very little downtime, and that downtime is going to be less in the near term!

All three of the luau’s at the Polynesian Cultural Center are sold out for weeks in advance. In an effort to provide more guests the opportunity to participate in a luau, they’ve added a fourth luau starting yesterday and continuing through the end of August. The Hale Ohana luau is now a double luau … one at 4pm and a second at 6pm. Ticket takers need to be at the Ohana Luau at 3:20pm and will be finished about 6:30pm to be able to get dinner at Prime Dining. That’s an hour longer than before. We’re scheduled on Friday to be at the Ohana Luau taking tickets. It’s one of our favorite assignments at the PCC, so it’ll be good to be there … just long!

One of our Japanese sister missionaries from Sapporo, Japan completed her mission this morning and left to return home. This was her original completion date, but because of the change in schedules at the MTC’s increasing from 2 weeks to 3 weeks, this transfer is seven weeks long instead of the normal six weeks. Missionaries generally go home and new missionaries arrive on the transfer day to minimize companionship disruptions. However the new Sapporo Temple will be dedicated this coming Sunday and the sister really wanted to be able to attend the dedication with her family. She’s been an outstanding missionary. She came right after we arrived on our mission and grew up with us as missionaries. We shall miss her as a missionary, but not for long. She’s coming back in September to BYU-Hawaii … and a dinner appointment with us.

So, this is the last week of this transfer. We’ll start our opposite schedule next Monday and will have a Thursday Preparation Day instead of a Wednesday Preparation day. Two more sister missionaries go home next Wednesday and three new missionaries arrive, leaving us with the same number of missionaries but with a different mix of languages.

So, ’til next time … ta ta for now!

This afternoon Nina and I along with a number of other missionaries in the Laie Zone met with our new mission president and his wife for a couple of hours. In the Church News article about President Bekker’s call, they had this to say:

James Henry Bekker, 60, and Delsie Anne Johansen Bekker, five children, Neff’s Canyon Ward, Salt Lake Mount Olympus Stake: Hawaii Honolulu Mission, succeeding President Stephen R. Warner and Sister Elizabeth Warner. Brother Bekker serves as a YSA adviser and is a former stake president, bishop, stake executive secretary and missionary in the Japan Tokyo Mission. Senior Associate Dean for Clinical Affairs, University of Utah School of Dentistry. Born in Salt Lake City to Henry Bekker and Louise Thomas Bekker Neel.

Sister Bekker serves as a stake Relief Society president and temple ordinance worker and is a former ward Relief Society president, and ward Relief Society, Young Women and Primary presidency counselor. Born in Salt Lake City to Johan Armand Johansen and Hildur Fluge Johansen.

They, of course, are just wonderful people and will be a delight to serve under here in the Hawaii Honolulu Mission. President Bekker is very soft spoken … but a very powerful speaker. His wife NEVER stops smiling. She has the most beautiful, broad smile and always seems genuinely happy to see and greet their missionaries.

We later met them again at the Polynesian Cultural Center where they came to take the 6:20pm Laie Tram Tour over to the Temple Visitors’ Center. They got to see first hand how this entire operation goes each evening. They’ve been making a whirlwind tour of the mission and I’m certain they’ll be right ready this evening to collapse into bed. We’re delighted that they are here. We’ll certainly miss President and Sister Warner. The Lord’s work here in Hawaii continues!

Ta ta for now!

This afternoon Nina and I had our weekly assignment at the Polynesian Cultural Center. This week we were taking tickets at the Aloha Luau, the largest of the luau venues at the Center. As usual, 90% of the luau guests arrived between 4:20 and 5:00pm and the other 10% didn’t get there until well after 6pm when the show was almost over. My Scotch brain can’t wrap my head around paying all that money for a luau and either showing up an hour and a half late or leaving an hour before the show is finished!

After we finished our assignments we walked over to the Prime Dining venue and had dinner. After dinner we walked out to the parking lot to go home. I took several pictures on the way and have put six of them in this blog entry. The first one is of the big sign when leaving the area where the Polynesian Island Displays are located (and where you need a ticket) to go into the new Hukilau Marketplace, where no ticket is needed and there are plenty of opportunities to spend money.

Just past the sign are three banana trees, each with one or more bunches of green bananas. They are great tourist attractions. Many guests take pictures looking like they are holding the bunch of bananas up, or like they are picking a banana. In about a week these will be ripe enough to take down and eat. Right now they’re in the stage where they are usually harvested, put in big plastic bags, and shipped to the US for further processing, then shipped to the store where they are almost ripe when they arrive.

The Pacific Theater is where the night show is put on. It’s a large venue and enclosed on three sides, the sides towards the shore and where the winds come from, thus sheltering the guests from the trade winds and any associated rain. There are cell phone antennas on top of the theater and a week ago the maintenance people put up the antennas for the BYU-Hawaii amateur radio club repeater. They are supposed to be pulling the coax cable for antennas this week into the room where the repeater will be located. As soon as that is done we will be able to install the ham radio repeater and get it back up on the air. That’ll be a welcome capability here on the north shore.

We had a beautiful sunset this evening with fluffy white clouds scattered across the sky offsetting the royal palm trees. I’m not sure it’s possible to have enough sunrise and sunset pictures from Hawaii. It seems that just about all of them are distinctively beautiful and picture worthy.

Nina is particularly fond of sunrise and sunset pictures and regularly posts these pictures on her Facebook page. They always get a lot of “likes”.

These little collapsable wagons are just about everywhere these days as children / stuff haulers. There are almost as many wagons now at the PCC as there are strollers, and there are a LOT of strollers (and a corresponding number of very tired children at the end of the day). This particular wagon was well loaded with children! There was definitely no space for anything else in the wagon. The wagon with the children was also a very popular photographic subject for the hundreds of Asian tourists at the PCC tonight.

The sun was just right on the exit signs as we were leaving the PCC to get into our car. We’d had a long, busy day and were right ready to go home! When we got home, our neighbors across the driveway were sitting outside in front of their garage in lawn chairs, so we pulled out a couple of chairs and visited with them for a while. We were having another lovely evening with a nice, cooling breeze. We had a delightful conversation as we unwound for the day. Now, that this blog post done, it’s time to go to bed! Tomorrow is another day at the Visitors’ Center followed by tram / bus coordination tomorrow evening. In between we’ll be meeting our new Hawaii Honolulu Mission President, President Becker, who is nearing the end of a hectic tour around the mission meeting all of the missionaries. We’ll be at the Visitors’ Center from 9am to 1:15pm, then to Kahuku (a neighboring town) along with several sister missionaries from 1:30 to 3:30pm to meet with President Becker. That’ll be followed by tram / bus coordination from 6-7pm. Then back home for dinner and falling into bed!

Ta ta for now!

Today has been a delightfully restful day. For the first time in several weeks we didn’t need to go to Honolulu to either the Honolulu Hawaii Mission Office and/or to the VA Medical Center. In fact, until 8pm this evening we had no appointments on our calendar or anywhere we needed to be. So, this morning we took care of some household cleaning and laundry things, had a leisurely lunch, and then took a drive to the north and west as far as the road goes (it used to go all the way around the point on the west of Oahu and down the coast to Pearl Harbor. However, a hurricane some twenty or so years ago washed out the road at the point and it’s never been repaired). We made several stops including at Shark’s Cove (no known reason for the name, sharks are rarely if ever seen on the north side of Oahu) to catch a picture of a giant sea turtle sunning on the beach.

We also stopped in Hale’ewa for some ice cream and by the Dillingham Airfield to watch some kite surfers do their thing out in the bay. We got back home about 6pm for a nice dinner. Then at 8pm we were over at the Visitors’ Center for song practice.

This coming Sunday afternoon at 6pm the sister missionaries are putting on another musical fireside at the Visitors’ Center. These events are very popular and we have some incredibly talented sisters. They are singing the closing number all together, an arrangement of Mendelssohn’s “Lift Thine Eyes” and I’m accompanying them on the piano. It’s a difficult song and has required a fair amount of practice. It came together quite well this evening so I’m very hopeful for Sunday!

Tomorrow morning we’re back to the Visitors’ Center in the morning and coordinating trams in the evening. I’ve remarked before that we seem to have gotten quite a bit busier at the Visitors’ Center over the past couple of months. The latest statistics are evidence that is the case!

The chart to the left shows the monthly visitors counts for the past eighteen months. 13,290 had been the record number of visitors until last May when the count started a dramatic climb. Two changes are driving that significant increase in visitors. First, working with the Polynesian Cultural Center, the dinner luau’s are now ending by 6:15pm meaning that the luau guests have time to get on the last two trams, 6:20pm and 6:40pm. Enough of them are taking advantage of the tram tour that we’ve had to add two twenty-five passenger busses to the last two tours.

The chart to the right shows the huge impact of the small change in schedule at the Polynesian Cultural Center with the number of tram visitors more than doubling the previous averages.

The second change has to do with the Chinese tour groups that have started coming to the Visitors’ Center in the early afternoon. Between 100 and 200 mainland Chinese visitors are now coming on tour busses and more than 5,000 came in the month of June. The word spread among the tour guides and tour companies that the Visitors’ Center is a beautiful place where there are Chinese-speaking people available to help their guests … all at no charge. The Chinese people really love anything that is free! That’s also evidenced by how much literature and how many Books of Mormon in the Chinese language they’ve taken. For instance, we’ve passed out more than ten cases of Simplified Chinese Books of Mormon in the past three weeks alone. Prior to April of this year I don’t remember a single Chinese tour bus stopping at the Visitors’ Center long enough for us to even tell them that they were welcome guests. One afternoon the Visitors’ Center Director just happened to be out front when a tour bus stopped in the traffic circle in front of the Center and talked with the tour guide briefly. He learned that they weren’t stopping because (1) they didn’t know anything about the place and (2) didn’t want to overwhelm us with forty or fifty people getting off the bus at one time. That started the change and within a couple of weeks five or ten busses were stopping, now growing to ten to fifteen busses a day. And, a couple of other tour companies catering to other nationalities have heard about us and are starting to stop to let their guests come into the Center, including the French and the Koreans.

So, a nice, restful Preparation Day is a delight … and we’re recharged and ready for another week at the Center and at the PCC. Life is grand!

Ta ta for now!

Ham Radio Field Day occurs the last full weekend in June every year. This is one of the hobby’s best liked events and ham radio clubs and operators take their equipment to the field, set up in a temporary location, and attempt to get as many contacts with other ham radio operators around the world as possible.

Last year in June the Honolulu ham radio club held their field day activities over on the western side of the island and I wasn’t able to get over there. This year the event was held at a regional park on the ocean a few miles south of Laie. Even better, I had a few hours in the morning this morning available, so I drove down and “played radio” for a couple of hours.

The club had set up two ham radio stations. One was operating CW (that is, morse code) and the other operating single sideband (that is, voice). Several antennas were set up along the seashore pointing generally northeast to southwest (towards North America on the northeast and towards southern Asia to the southwest). The CW (that stands for ‘continuous wave’, meaning it is just sending a tone. Single sideband, or voice, sends a modulated signal so that the voice can be extracted from it by the receiving station) station was connected to an amplifier running several hundred watts of transmitted power. The voice station’s amplifier was broken, so it was running “barefoot” … putting out one hundred watts of power. There was a LOT of static and band conditions were generally pretty poor, but I was able to make several contacts in the few minutes I was able to sit at the transmitter behind the microphone. Being setup on the seashore beside a huge body of salt water is a major benefit to radio transmitters. Even with a small amount of power, the location helps the antennas to be much more efficient.

I then assisted putting up the last of the antennas, a trapped dipole set to work in an inverted V configuration tuned for the 75/80 meter band. Thats a lot of words describing a wire hung on a pole about 40′ in the air with either end stretching down to the ground at about a 45° angle. The radio that would be using this antenna hadn’t arrived, yet.

While I was there, the other missionary ham radio operator here in Laie, Paul Crookston KB7ZIH and his wife stopped by the field day location. He had been the radio operator on the Iosepa double-hulled canoe that I’ve written about previously, the one that I reported as having capsized. Paul clarified that it wasn’t the Iosepa that capsized, it was the pilot boat! It wasn’t anchored properly, was very tail heavy, and just before midnight last Saturday night, it flipped over. The Iosepa weathered the seas just fine … the modern-technology boat didn’t. There’s probably a lesson in there somewhere….

Ta ta for now!

I’ve mentioned previously the Mainland Chinese tourist phenomenon that started a couple of months ago and continues non-abated. I’m not sure what the traveling times are for the Chinese. For instance, we will see the most Europeans during July and August when Continental Europe pretty much shuts down while people take 3 to 4 week vacations. We see a lot of Koreans around the Lunar New Year and the Japanese during the January new year.

The male senior missionary goes out to every tour bus that stops at the Visitors’ Center to meet the driver and/or the tour guide, to thank them for coming, answer any questions, and get a passenger count. That seems to have had the desired effect in that we’re coming to know the drivers / tour guides, they’re getting to know us a little better, and are willing to turn their passengers over to us for a longer period of time. Some of the tour guides are starting to bring their passengers into the Visitors’ Center rather than sitting in the bus reading Facebook, or sleeping, or smoking.

What I’ve learned is that these tourists have arrived the previous evening and are flying onward this evening. They may be on their way back home having flown in from San Francisco last night and going on to Beijing tonight, or are just starting their vacation having flown in from Beijing last night and going onward to San Francisco later this evening. They have one night and one day in Oahu. Their tour company has already booked those that are interested onto a around-the-island all-day tour. Others may book a different tour. The ones that come here on the around-the-island tour have started their tour at Pearl Harbor for a very abbreviated stay and then make six or seven stops, returning to their hotel about 5pm in the evening. Depending on which route they take (that is, clockwise or counter-clockwise), the size of the tour (meaning how big the bus or van is), and which variation of the tour they want (there seems to be three different variations of places they stop on the tour) the tour group will arrive at the Visitors’ Center in the late morning or in the mid-afternoon. A few come around 10am. Most are from 2-4pm. I haven’t seen any later than 4pm as it’s an hour from here back to their hotel in Waikiki.

In any regard, we’re very happy to have them stop. We’re also starting to get other tour companies that aren’t Chinese-specific to stop. Today we had a small group of Germans and another slightly larger group from France stop on their around-the-island tours.

The kidney stone issue seems to be behind me. The intravenous contrast agent used during the CAT scan has an impact on my kidney function, so my doctor ordered a blood workup last Wednesday. The results came back today and the agent did have an impact, but not serious. My kidney function is down around 50% and was improving until the issue with kidney stones. Hopefully we can regain that ground. I’m still waiting for the lab analysis of the three kidney stones. All I know right now is I don’t want to do that again! A heavy dose of ibuprofen knocked down the pain followed by an oxycodone pill to make life bearable. I’ll hang onto some of that for a while “just in case”.

In addition to our normal shifts at the Visitors’ Center, we now have added work with the Laie Tram Tour. Two nights a week Nina and I go over to the PCC between 6 and 7pm to coordinate the couple-hundred people who want to take the tour. The other two senior couples also go over two nights a week. On the two evenings that we are on shift at the Visitors’ Center, I spend the time from 6:30pm to 7:10pm out front helping coordinate the loading and unloading of the trams and busses. During most of the afternoon one tram makes the circuit every twenty minutes. However, the demand is large enough at 6pm that we usually need two trams. At 6:20pm and 6:40pm, the last two tours of the day, we need two trams and two twenty-five passenger busses (and still turn folks away). Those last two times means juggling four big vehicles in very small spaces, both at the PCC and in front of the Visitors’ Center.

When I’m out front at the Visitors’ Center, I like to visit with the people waiting for the trams/busses to come back. I ask them about their day, what they thought of the PCC, how was their visit to the Temple Visitors’ Center, and did they have any questions. I’ll usually talk to fifteen or twenty people with more than just “Aloha!”.

On Tuesday evening, a young couple (picture to the left) were waiting for the tram. They were having a great time on an around-the-world tour. While they weren’t interested much in religion, they were glad they had stopped, but both of them had no more battery power so they couldn’t take any pictures. She was particularly dismayed because they were in such a beautiful place. So, I offered to take their picture and email it to them. I took the picture, he entered the email address, and away the picture went. I told them about the France temple that’s under construction and encouraged them to watch the news in a a couple of years for the open house. This morning I got a very brief email back: “Merci … we had a great visit. You are very kind. We will watch for your new temple.” Now that I have a verified email address, I’ll be sure to let them know when the temple is completed and the open house starts. Maybe we can go to France and go with them??? Miracles can happen!

Ta ta for now!