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!