We see that in Wyoming, the temps are moving up just a little, while the east is getting hit by storms. Ironically, among much of our family, Cheyenne is tied with the highest temperatures for today (that is if you don't count Texas which seems to be gorgeous right now). We finally figured out that the little field outside our duplex is growing brussel sprouts.
We had one of our busiest weeks ever last week. We keep adding more great activities to our days. Last week, we helped drive cars from the dealership in Thousand Oaks to the mission office, where the "car czar" Elder Wilson gets them prepared with a driving monitor and bike rack. Thousand Oaks is actually about 20 miles from us and then the mission office is another 20 miles in the same direction, so the trips take us about an hour-and-a-half for each car. The church is replacing cars that are only about 18 months old, and the worker at the dealership said that the church bought these 70 or so cars for about $29,000 in 2021, and now the church is selling them back to the dealerships for $31,000. That is part of the reason why we spend so much time driving new cars, the deal is too good to pass up.
We have had a lot of rain, and the cars are now parked in the mission office parking lot, which is a shallow lake, thanks to the rain. Today, Tuesday, the 11th atmospheric river of 2023 in Cali made landfall in California, and our mission had scheduled a zone conference for the San Luis Obispo area. I wrote to the mission secretary and asked her when the leaders would decide whether to postpone or cancel the conference. Our missionaries travel 100 miles by car to attend, and the weather forecasts in every surrounding location had huge weather watches and warnings, the red exclamation marks. The secretary asked, "Oh, dear, what's wrong? Why would we cancel?" That's when I realized that with my Wyoming experience, we always allow for bad weather with the promise to cancel and reschedule, but in California, that is a foreign concept. Thus, our friends are out there somewhere in their cars, hopefully, staying afloat. Dad and I were assigned to take a young missionary to the airport, and as a result, we didn't have to drive in much of the bad weather. Dad did drive in rain, but before the flooding started. We were grateful for that.
I would love to tell you a little about our friends to give you a sense of our typical week. Rogelio (age 60) is a friend who has been living with a very cute little woman, but who could never get a divorce from his wife in Mexico. He and his wife have been separated for 20+ years. So we are helping him with the paperwork and visited him Tuesday. The state of California is willing to grant a divorce to someone who lives here, even when he is not an American citizen. We also went to visit a young mom, Alicia, on Wednesday, who really loves me because I had 7 children. She has four. Her baby is named Jenny and her 3rd is named Amy. Her other two have the names of Larry's uncle and aunt, Jerry and Ruby. We just love her. She came to church and her baby, Jenny, was fussy. An older woman walked up, grabbed the baby, and kept her happy during the meeting, and we loved how natural it was for this woman to help and to love. We took cinnamon rolls to our friends, the Rangels, and their two daughters kept giving me hugs and more hugs because they loved the rolls. :) It made me feel good. We have a friend, Gilberto, who we love deeply, who comes to church all the time, along with his AA meetings, as a help to overcome his alcoholism. All of a sudden, he disappeared, and we are very worried about him. He drives a huge truck with his name on it because he is a heater repairman and installer, so we have been looking for his truck. We just want to tell him we love him. We fear that he took a drink somewhere and he is really discouraged. Our friends, the Chavez family, who we are helping to get passports, handed us a sack of warm tamales on Thursday, as we left their house and Larry is holding them on a plate in the picture. They were amazingly delicious!! The food here is SO good. Finally, we had a night on Friday with the two Hectors. The first Hector (a landscape company owner whose employees live with him) read one of Larry's booklets about Christ. He loves Christ, but he doesn't want to come to church. We asked him about that. He said that he has been meeting with missionaries for a year because he is a little too nice to tell them he needs some time away. He typically would tell a missionary that he wanted to stop the lessons, and then a new missionary would come back and start to teach again, and Hector would be too polite to tell them that he wasn't ready. Anyway, he was pretty cute, trying not to hurt anyone's feelings. So we told him we would listen to his polite request and give him a rest. Our second Hector (a solderer who helps create unique tractor equipment for the variously sized farms in Oxnard) that night asked about our church. He kept asking if we had commandments. We told him about the ten commandments, and he said, "Not those." Then we told him about the word of wisdom and alcohol, which is quite common, and he said, "No not that." Then we mentioned smoking and he said, "That's it!" He was so funny, he wanted us to guess. So we told him that we would start praying with him. get him some support, maybe nicotine patches, and find ways to help him quit smoking. He was so happy! It was a really cute, sweet night. Now I only hope that we can help him to quit. He will be so happy. And that's some of our typical week.
On Saturday, Larry and I went to Glendale to meet our friends and his favorite mission companion, Paul Schofield. We had a wonderful two hours talking as fast as we could while trying to catch up on five years. Another of their mission companions is going to be the Bogota Temple president for the next three years. Then, we drove to Thousand Oaks, where some very wealthy patrons of the arts sponsor a performance of The Lamb of God with a huge orchestra and professional soloists. I was in heaven. All the benches in the typical sacrament meeting chapel were removed and the room was filled with the orchestra. Then we, the guests, sat on chairs in the gym. And the music surrounded us. It was amazing. I love taking advantage of the opportunities of living in a big city. When it was over, we drove to a baptism in Oxnard where I gave a talk in Spanish without notes. It went really well, until I started getting tired, and accidentally skipped a lot of the story I was telling. But it was a great experience. When I told the story about how the Holy Ghost helped me stay calm, I told the audience that I'm a very nervous person. Ha ha! Larry told me that Chase Bethers was on the front row, and he smiled and nodded his head. Yup! That fact wasn't news to him. And I might be just a little like his mom. Then, on Sunday, we went to our typical three sets of meetings. We have a long day, but we love the meetings, the messages of love given in Spanish, the chance to hug so many people who we have grown to love, the music which we love.
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