June 9, 2024

This week was the start of our (6) week cycle now that Transfers & Zone Conferences are over. That means it is usually a quieter week where we get caught up on our office duties and try to get a little rest. Although it was quieter, it was still busy for Elder Rowan because he is still getting so many new cars in. The Church has told him that we need to keep all of our Hybrid Rav4s for (2) years so that means we are running out of old cars to change out. We are now trading out cars that have 5,000 miles or are 2024's. It is crazy! This week I went with him and the Sister missionaries to pick up (3) Subaru Crosstreks and he went with the Assistants to pick up (3) Hyundai Tucson's. Then on Monday we have to pick up (5) Toyota Corollas. We currently have (21) cars sitting in the parking lot waiting for something to happen with them. Eleven will be picked up for auction next Tuesday and then we have to start assigning out the new ones. Usually the mission cars are white, gray, or silver. But these Subarus have been more bold colors like green and red. The green ones are an olive green and the Social Media Sisters are begging for one :).

We had to go to Salem to pick up the Subarus so I asked Elder Rowan if we could stop at the Peony farm to walk around before they closed for the season. They are open to the public for about 6 weeks to tour the gardens. We were at the tail end but they were still really pretty and I am glad we got there. They pick the peonies and sell as cut flowers but mostly they divide and sell the roots. Who knew there were so many varieties of peonies?

Tuesday was MLC so that meant we prepared dinner for the group. We were lucky this time because we had 20 lbs of frozen pork left over from Mission Tour so we were able to make Cafe Rio for the missionaries. Some missionaries do not know what Cafe Rio is if they don't come from Utah/Idaho, etc. but if I had to pick a favorite meal of the missionaries, this is what I would pick. They were so happy and it was not a hard meal for us :).

We had some printer problems at our apartment this week which are always frustrating because we are not that savvy at fixing them. We are always grateful when we can call our SIL, Chris, for help. I was proud of myself that I could do lots of trouble shooting but in the end Chris helped me figure out that some of our USB ports have gone bad. We are just crossing our fingers that we can limp along until we get home before worrying about a new computer. In the meantime a USB Hub solved our problems since we still have a few USB ports that work. Hooray!!

Elder Rowan spent all day Friday driving around the southern part of our mission with Elder Larson. Elder Larson had not visited many of the apartments in that area and wanted to have eyes on them. Elder Rowan helped him with his inspections and they gathered up broken items from apartments, things they should not have in apartments, and delivered things that they needed for the apartments. They had a fun day visiting with all the missionaries while still getting lots of things done.

On Sunday nights we usually have our District Council. The young missionaries do Accountability which means they talk about who they are teaching, problems they have, etc. For a while they had us Sr missionaries do accountability too but it was usually pretty lame because we did not have much to report. A few weeks ago they came up with the idea of having a Sr missionary do a 5 minute life lesson instead of Accountability. They want us to impose our knowledge and wisdom on them. It is my turn tonight and I am stressing a little over what to talk about. I am not sure what they expect. I think I will talk about credit cards. We will see how it goes :).

We were very blessed this week that we got to attend the graduation from high school of our granddaughter, Danica. Danica has worked very hard and graduated in the top 5% of her class and was the Salutatorian. She missed out on being one of the Valedictorian by one A- she got in one of her college classes (:. She is also graduating with her Associates degree here in about (2) weeks. She received a scholarship from Boise State and will attend there in the fall with many of her friends. She is amazing and we look forward to seeing what the future holds for her.