Getting close to winding things up

President Kendell once described time spent in Missionary work as, ‘long days and short weeks”. This week we experienced a short week and short days, yet another fun week as Missionaries. As we near the end of our Mission it feels as though every hour of every day, “we are living the dream”.

Monday was a holiday here, so we just stayed in our apartment, made some Face Time calls, met Chatterton’s for lunch (at John’s favorite pork knuckle restaurant), then a tenacious game of five crowns at their apartment.

Traditionally the New Year is celebrated for two weeks, so the rest of the week was still being celebrated by the Chinese. We were in the office during the week working, mostly catching up on loose ends created by the change of leadership. Karen did attend institute but then didn't feel well enough for our Temple assignment, so upon the insistence of Karen stating that she would be fine left alone and the shortage of volunteers I attended by myself.

She felt fine the next day and we both attended our weekly Welfare Meeting. As I have mentioned before we enjoy being a part of this committee and recognize the blessing it is to us to be able to see all the humanitarian work the Church is involved with in Asia. It also gives us a glimpse of how the Church manages at a General Authority level.

The Area Presidency is going to hold a Mission President Seminar in Taiwan next week, so we helped Elder and Sister Hyde with several other Senior Missionaries prepare materials for the seminar.

President and Sister Funk joined us for lunch Friday to celebrate Sister Beckstead and Sister Seller’s February birthdays. They were both born on the 26^th of February although Karen was several years later than Sister Sellers. (Sister Beckstead is not only the prettiest Sister Missionary in our group but one of the younger ones as well).

We ended the week with Branch Conference. President Holyoke and his wife attended with other District Officers. He was telling me that he is going home for a couple of weeks and that he lives in Cedar Hills. It sounds like he lives just a few streets west of the Sarah, so we’ll need to get is address so that we can see them after we come home.