Welcome to the year 2023! We are welcoming it here with tons of rain, and we feel really blessed. We have seen two huge eucalyptus trees down on the 101 (Ventura Highway), but otherwise, our area is doing well with the moisture, which we desperately need. Right now, the hills are all a gorgeous green, almost like we live in the jungle.
So what did we do this week? Well, we had some great meetings and lessons with some of our friends on Tuesday. Then, on Wednesday, we began the 2+ -hour drive to Santa Maria so that we could watch and work with our English Connect teachers. When we drive this far, we try to spend the night in a church apartment with another couple, so we spent the night in Pismo Beach with the Millers. The next morning, the couple showed us where they work at the San Luis Obispo Institute with students at Cal Poly. We enjoyed hearing about their mission and how much they enjoy working with the college students. On our way back home, we decided to take more time by going to see elephant seals and the Hearst Castle in the north part of the mission. It was raining a lot, but we still LOVED the crazy seals. They were pretty wild because it is birthing and mating season. We saw mothers nursing their young and males fighting for domination of the females. We enjoyed learning more about the Hearsts at the visitors center, but decided against going up the hill on a bus to the castle in the rain. We hiked in a beautiful park named Montana de Oro, and we walked out on piers looking at the California Sea Lions. It was so cloudy and rainy that we couldn't see whales, but this is the season for them. We got to see a semi truck on fire. We saw some gorgeous tidepools and a monarch butterfly garden with tens of thousands of butterflies sleeping in the trees. The butterflies blended into the trees so that at first, we didn't realize what we were seeing. Fortunately we brought the binoculars and we could see them well at close range. We also stopped at a cave with native American paintings from the 1600s. The paintings are behind a metal grate, but they are beautiful. Again, the binoculars made seeing the paintings possible. There is so much to see here and we are constantly amazed!
On Saturday night, for New Years Eve, we played games with another couple who are working in the mission here. They are in charge of finding apartments for every one who is assigned to the mission and keeping everything in good repair. Then, on Sunday, I played the piano for a Hermana who sang a beautiful song in Spanish. Later that day, our mission president called and asked us to take another trip up to Santa Maria and Lompoc to pick up four missionaries who went home today in time for the Spring semester. So Larry drove the huge mission van in the rain another 6 hours to pick up and drop off a few missionaries, each with two 50-pound bags and a 30 pound backpack. They cram those things full. One of our missionaries who is going home to Park City did some skateboarding here while he was serving his mission and won some skateboards as a prize. So he donated all his clothes at the end of his mission to Goodwill and filled his suitcases with 4 skateboards. The van that Larry drives has a little female voice that says things like "please watch your speed" and other things like "warning: aggressive driving" when the mission president drives into his driveway.
That is pretty much a typical week for us. We do all sorts of interesting things, and we love the variety in assignments and in the wonderful people we meet. We are learning Spanish together. Last week, we both heard a talk, and afterwards we compared notes.I asked him what the whole Buzz Lightyear talk was about. Larry said, "Buzz Lightyear? I thought the speaker was saying "Bad Lawyer" Now that talk makes more sense." Larry said that he really enjoyed the idea of believing in yourself but needing a realistic view of who you are; I didn't really understand those deep concepts in Spanish, but once I combined those with Buzz Lightyear, I got it. Ha ha! It takes two of us together to understand what some of our friends are saying. That said, Larry still has some of the very best Spanish in the mission and I'm very proud of him.
No comments:
Post a Comment