The most often asked question that I get at the Visitors’ Center is something like, “How did you get such a cush assignment?” or “Who did you know?” Today I had, for the first time, a variation of that question: “What do I need to do to be able to serve here?”

There are some 35 senior missionary couples and about 10 senior single sister missionaries here. As I’ve gotten to know them, very few requested this assignment and most didn’t request any specific assignment, but did just what we did: say that we’d be willing to serve anywhere and that we were willing to serve for 18 or 23 months. There are only one or two vacancies a month here and I’ve heard that Hawaii is a highly requested assignment. All that means is that I have no answer for what someone needs to do to be able to serve here in Laie!

Nina and I are speaking in Sacrament meeting tomorrow. I’ve been fretting over this for several days … and Nina has been in a real tizzy. It’s now about 9:30 pm and she’s still trying to figure out how to start the talk … which will be delivered tomorrow at about 12:30 pm. Since it’s Mother’s Day, we’ve been asked to talk on themes related to that topic. Nina will also do a bit of introduction since most of the Ward do not know anything about us. We’ve been told we’ll have about ten minutes each.

It’s a very true theory that if I’m to talk on a subject for an hour, it’ll take about two hours to prepare. But if I’m to speak on a topic for ten minutes, it’ll that two days to prepare. Ten minutes is seemingly over in a heartbeat, so the preparation is all about getting succinct enough to cover the topic in the short amount of time. So, I’ve rewritten my talk at least four times and each time it has gotten marginally better. I’m pretty sure that I’ll be rewriting it in my sleep tonight.

As if speaking in Sacrament meeting wasn’t enough, the High Priest Group Leader asked me to take the Priesthood lesson tomorrow. Originally that was planned to happen next week, but schedules change. Fortunately, the topic (the value of the Book of Mormon) is a comfortable topic.

However, since my real computer is in the shop, I’ve been using a Dell Windows 7 laptop. That laptop was specifically for my ham radio hobby since all of the good software for ham radios is Windows based. Some of the things I wanted to do for the lesson are very easy to accomplish on the Mac, but are more difficult on the Dell laptop. There is a lot of “built-in” software on the Mac that has to be found, installed, and configured for the Dell machine. An example: There’s a conference talk from which I’d like to use some excerpts. There are MP4 video and MP3 audio versions available on the LDS.org website. On the Mac I can use iMovie to slice out the excerpts I want, shove them off to my Apple TV and show them using my LCD projector. Maybe a half-hour of work to assemble all of the excerpts.

No such software exists on Windows as installed (Windows Movie Maker used to be available, it was a great program, and probably for that reason, it’s no longer available). I’d have to buy a program to do that. Further, I’m limited to VGA resolution when connected to the LCD projector. So, I downloaded the MP3 audio version, downloaded and installed Audacity to do the sound editing, and downloaded and installed Lame to be able to export an MP3 after the excerpts were prepared in Audacity. In order not to have to take the Dell laptop to the meeting tomorrow, I pushed the MP3’s to Dropbox so I can load them onto my iPhone to play during the class time tomorrow. It was a lot more work and the result is audio and not video. How do people who aren’t computer geeks do this stuff on a Windows machine?

I also downloaded and installed OpenOffice so I could build a PowerPoint-like presentation to help guide the discussion during the lesson. Then I had to download and install CutePDF so I could print the presentation as a PDF file, push it to Dropbox, so I can make the presentation from my iPhone. If I were able to make the video excerpts, then I would have used PowerPoint for the iPad (or Apple’s Presentations software which works a bit better than PowerPoint), and imbedded the video clips in the presentation. As it is, I’ll be switching between applications rather than having something much more seamless.

And, of course, I’m whining. It’s all my own fault, actually. I’m the one who spilled the milk on the keyboard which put the Macbook in the repair shop to start with. I suspect that if I were using the Dell notebook as my main computer that over time I’d already have found and installed all of the needed software sometime ago. So, I’ll now stop whining. Everything is in readiness. I can stop fretting and fussing. It’s bedtime, anyway!

Life continues….