Scarey things are happening......

On Thursday morning we were going to the office and about 7 blocks from our home we passed a gas station that we have gone to several times. It had yellow tape blocking it off. I said, "That looks like a crime scene." That evening we heard on the news that (2) 22-year old girls were shot point blank and killed while in their car at that station. It was an ex-boyfriend of one of them that killed them. They found him dead from gunshot wounds in his car about 5 miles away about 2 hours later. He had committed suicide. Scarey, huh?
Despite all of the bad things that can happen, there is a lot of wonderful things happening here also!

Life in Florida........

We get to go to the President's home the night before missionaries leave to go home and have dinner with them. This was our last one.This is a picture of me with my darling hairdresser, Heather Hale. She is the daughter of President & Sister Hale from North Salt Lake. I just wished she could make me look as cute as she is. She's as darling on the inside as on the outside. She graduated from beauty college last spring just before they came into the mission.We try to have a set of missionaries for dinner on Sunday. Today we had Elder Holland and Elder Bird and Flat Stanley. They were just made zone leaders here in the Fort Lauderdale Zone so they attend our ward.
Here we are with Flat Stanley going into the office. He is a little guy who was flattened by a falling chalkboard. Schools use him as a pen pal. You are supposed to send him to a friend. They take pictures with Stanley wherever they go and send back to you. We sent one to each of our children's families to take pictures so they can see what we are doing. Tim wanted us to have one also so Flat Stanley goes with us wherever we go. We will post our pictures with him soon.

Going Hollywood and loving it..............

We spoke in the Hollywood Ward today. The Bishop is a missionary that Jeremy trained in Spain, Bishop Jeremy Hoopes. He is 32 years old now. He had been married 6 months when the Stake President called him in and told him they needed him to be the Bishop in Hollywood which is about 10 miles away from where he was living. He was asked to move so that he was in the ward boundaries.

My first "Sisters Conference"

We had our 1st "Sisters Conference" yesterday at Pres Hales home. Here we are with all of us. We had 29 including Sis Hale and her two daughters.









Here is Tim feeding the ducks and turtles some bread.

Nightmare baptism............................

I had to play the piano for a baptism at the Fort Lauderdale Ward of a Creole sister and her 12 yr old daughter. It was quite an experience. It was supposed to start at 7:00 but they told me this afternoon that it would probably start at 7:30 so they would like music being played from 7:20 pm. I had been playing about 25 minutes and Tim said to slow down because those being baptized hadn’t even arrived yet. They arrived within about 10 minutes and we got started at 8:00. It lasted until 9:00 because of problems we had. One of the older Black brothers in our ward did the baptism, or should I say tried. He doesn’t speak Creole so our missionary, Elder Blanchard, wrote it out for him and he had been practicing it. The young daughter went first. The first 4 times of trying to say it, Elder Blanchard had to stop him and have him start over because he was not saying it right. The old Creole Bishop tried to help him and he tried again. Again he did it wrong. Elder Blanchard then told him word by word. Next they tried to actually baptize the girl but she and her mother are deathly afraid of water so as soon as he started to put her under the water she jumped up so he had to do it all over. Again Elder Blanchard helped. The second time the girl did the same thing. The man baptizing her tried to grab her head and push it back under as she was fighting him. It made me think of someone trying to drown someone else and making sure that they didn’t come back up. After the 3rd try she gave up and wanted her mom to go first.
Pretty much the same thing happened with the mom only she was bigger. Neither her nor her daughter would lean backwards. The 1st time with the mom, the man lost his balance as she tried to get up and both of them fell against the wall. After about 3 attempts for the mom, they finally asked her to get on her knees and lean forward to go under. It took her a couple of times that way before she finally got all the way under.
Next it was the young daughter’s turn to try again. They also tried her a couple of times leaning forward but she never did make it all the way under. She kept spurting water out of her mouth and trying to get it out of her ears. They will NOT have a good memory of their baptism day. It took us an hour to get them both baptized!

Where did that referral go?...........

This week Sis Dalling dialed a wrong number and hung up. A few minutes later a gentleman called asking what she wanted. She said she was sorry she rang the wrong number but did he know about our church and would he like to know more. He said "yes". So she filled out a referral slip on him and gave it to me. As soon as she gave it to me, she asked if she could have it back because she wanted to call the missionaries herself. As we were going home, I said, "You need to give me that referral so I can put it on the computer. She was sure she had given it back to me so she started to search through my trash, thinking I had thrown it away. She didn't find it and I was sure she still had it so I started going through her trash. Neither of us had any luck. That is when Tim caught us with the camera. As she was putting things away to go home, she opened one of her drawers and there it was in her drawer. We had a good laugh!!!

Our baby ducklings....

Aren't they cute. We have 3 families with 14 babies each.

Floods and baptisms!!!!!

We got flooded in our bathroom, hallway, washer/dryer closet and part way into our living room and bedroom 2 days ago. The apartment upstairs above us had a leak somewhere. They are terrible about getting it taken care of properly. They tore the carpet back, removed the wet padding and then put the wet carpet back for a day for us to walk on. Then the next day they came back, put in new padding and layed the wet carpet back on it! When we got home at lunch today, it smelled like a garbage can so we complained. When we got home from the office tonight they had been here and have a big fan going now. They should have done that 2 days ago. Mold grows very easily here.
The ward we are in is on fire with missionary work. We have 7 missionaries besides ourselves in the Fort Lauderdale ward. 2 are Creole missionaries (Haitian); 2 are the Assistants to the Mission President, 3 are zone leaders. They are now teaching 31 investigators. Friday night our Bishop who is black and awesome, goes to the church and greets any investigators the missionaries brings by and takes them on a tour of the church and welcomes them. (He has only been a member for 7 years himself).Our zone leaders have run across a recently retired minister of another church and he and his wife are taking the discussions and are very excited. They have even asked the missionaries to come and "preach a sermon" at their church. The president said that is "fantastic....GO!!!!" The minister has a huge influence on the congregation. He also has 11 children of his own, all of which have about 7 kids each so he has a huge family of his own, who would follow his lead. They all live in the Fort Lauderdale. So you can see why we are excited. Wouldn't that be neat to baptize a whole congretation. We heard that it happened recently in Alabama!!!

I am doing my best to keep Tim busy. He is getting really good at it.We took our P-Day yesterday to drive the coast down to Miami and see the sights. We stayed in our car most of the time and just looked. The coast was beautiful and huge hotels and resorts all along the way. We also saw Little Havana which is a section of Miami where the people are very poor and it looks like Mexico. All of the store signs are in Spanish and Spanish music coming out of them.
We also went out to Key Biscayne but wasn’t impressed. Just as we were walking up to go see the Lighthouse, the forest ranger put the “Closed” sign out and locked the gate. Just our luck. So we walked on a little path to the water’s edge and I stuck my foot in to see how cold it was. My pant legs got wet and sandy and the sand was very very hot – it burned my feet if I took my sandles off. So the rest of the way home, the sand scratched my legs. There wasn’t much else to see on the island.We took this picture of Tim in a banyon tree along the way. I am fascinated with these trees.

There is an outbreak of “swine flu” in Mexico and some confirmed cases in the US. A teenager in Hallandale just died this morning from it. It is about 20 miles from us. We went through that town yesterday on our little ride. Some of the members of our ward live in that town. They have closed some of the schools near Hallandale down to scrub them down. We were told in church to not shake hands anymore, get our food storage in order as we may have stores close as well as trucking firms stop delivering if it gets bad here in the US.