My mind is telling me it’s time to be doing something other than sitting around the house. The trip to Rehab on Monday, while painful, was a breath of fresh air. I did go to Sacrament Meeting on Sunday and enjoyed that time out of the house as well. (Warning: Lots of Mormon jargon follows)

Another opportunity came up yesterday evening. My Church calling is to serve on the High Council for the Pocatello Stake. The High Council is kind of like an advisory body to the Stake President as well as his eyes and ears in the Wards and Branches in the Stake. I haven’t been able to do anything in this calling for the past month. Then I got an email from the Stake Executive Secretary that there was a meeting on Tuesday evening at 8:30 to include the High Council, Young Mens Presidency, Young Womens Presidency, Stake Sunday School Presidency, Bishoprics, and Branch Presidencies. That was intriguing enough. Nina was willing to be my chauffeur, getting dressed in a suit would work (I’d done that on Sunday). So I decided to go.

The only issue in my mind was what would be available to sit on. Best would be a chair with arms so I could control the sitting down process and push up out of the chair. I was pretty sure that the Relief Society room at the Stake Center didn’t have that kind of a chair. There would be enough people there, though that I should be able to get a couple of men to help me stand up.

The other change I made was to get into the front seat of the car rather than the back seat. We have a six-foot kind of a belt strap. I thought I could use that to loop underneath each foot to help lift it into the car. It worked! Getting into and out of the car turned out to be relatively pain free and straight-forward.

The meeting went from 8:30 pm to 10 pm. There was exactly the right kind of a chair in the foyer and one of the brothers volunteered to push the chair into the Relief Society Room for me to sit on. It worked perfectly! I managed to sit for 90 minutes without too much fidgeting and participate in the meeting and discussion. The meeting was to introduce the new youth curriculum for next year. The Church is making a significant change and upgrade to the materials and lesson topics for the teen-aged Sunday School, Young Mens, and Young Womens organizations. All of the material is online with lots of supplementary information. The youth are directly involved in deciding what topics should be discussed. They also aren’t “lessons” anymore in the traditional sense of a lesson. The expectation is that the “teacher” will talk 40% of the time or less with the members of the class doing most of the talking (my past experience is that the youth have no trouble talking … we’ve spent most of our adult years shushing them up). This is going to be a good change.

I got back home about 10:30 pm. Tired … very tired … and ready to crash for the night. It was very good to get out of the house!

Today is another trip out of the house … this time to Rehab. I expect to also come home exhausted. It’s a beautiful day outside. The temperatures will be in the mid 50’s for the Trick or Treaters tonight. We should get quite a few of them. Nina will need to do the duties at the door, though. I don’t have enough strength and agility.

Ta ta for now!