Making a Little Progress

This past couple of weeks have been very productive. By the end of the day today, we should have produced our third patriarchal blessing report, with good progress, thanks mostly to Olga, who is really plowing through her transcription assignments. We have documented a few more office processes (e.g., boundaries, leadership and district conferences and mission tours), completing our initial slate of processes. We have also identified a number of others that need similar attention. We have successfully created and posted our Area Seventy Calendar in Outlook on the web, so now the mission presidents and staff have immediate access to the most current calendar. The only problem is that it is not read-only. This makes me more than a little nervous. If we can't protect the calendar we might have to maintain a second one as a backup. That would be a real pain! We have also completed a number of important details for the August Annual Mission President Seminar. This week we finalized all of our travel arrangements for the 55 individuals who will be attending. This includes a rather detailed schedule of shuttling individuals to and from the airport and a number of train stations in St. Petersburg. Chris has both cultural events and transportation completed, as well. Now is it just a matter of fine tuning our plans as we move forward.

We try to make the most of these little gifts of time (whenever the Area Presidency is out of town)to catch up on these sort of things. Somehow, the balance of activities and the time to do them always seems to work out.

On Tuesday, we had a very special FHE at the Nearons, with each of the senior missionaries sharing their most poignant moments of church experience. Too sacred to record here, but we were all touched by how the spirit works in families and how connected we feel as a group, having known each other for just a short time.

We had suprise house guests on Wednesday morning. On Tuesday evening, I got a call from Jonathan and Whitney. They had just finished their tour of Kyiv and were comming back to Moscow to catch a train to Samara, the next afternoon. They were taking an overnight train to Moscow and were getting in around 6:30 in morning and were wondering if they could crash for a while in our apartment and take showers. It worked out well, because we were going shopping that morning. So they arrived about 8:00 a.m. and we took off around 8:30 to go shopping, so they had the place to themselves. They were just getting ready to leave when we returned and were able to get a lift from Yuri, our driver, to the train station. Funny how things just kind of work out.

Shopping was a success. It's always fun to have food in our cupboard. I think we could probably survive for a couple a months at the moment, just filling in with fruits and vegetables and freshly baked bread.

We talked with Jason and Abby this week, who are in the middle of moving into their new homes. Abby is already in and Jason, will follow in a couple of weeks. Abby had her mom to help her get settled. Nick is still in training. He graduates in about 10 days. Abby and Lore will fly out for Nick's graduation and they will drive back together. While Nick is settling in Alabama about 600 miles from Dallas, Jason is moving about .5 mile away, but to a home with a much better floor plan than the one they are in currently. I checked both of them out on Google earth. Pretty cool technology. I just wish when you zoomed in it would be a little clearer. Still looking for pictures!!!

We also had a great little video conference with Sarah and Gregorio. He is getting bigger!!

It has been a little bit like Dallas with big thunderstorms lately. It really cooled off for a couple days...down in the 50's. But it is back into the 60's now and it is expected to get back into the mid 70's by the weekend. (For those of you in Dallas, I am sure that doesn't sound much like a summer weather report. I guess I was thinking more about thunderstorms and hail, than temperature.)

At sunset last night I took this picture of the big apartment building that we can see out of our window, which is near the Cokol metro station. The photo actually does a pretty decent job of capturing the intensity of the reflection that we observed on its tower (click on the photo to get a larger image). It was as though it had been gilded in gold and set in the noon day sun.