11 May 2010

I guess that Spring has officially arrived. We didn't leave the office until after 5:00 PM tonight, and it started to rain as we came home. Now there is thunder and lightning for the first time this season. The weather has been pretty pleasant for the past month, but this kind of weather action puts winter into the past. (By the way, Happy Birthday, Eric!)

People keep writing to us that we should stay focused and not get "trunky." Fat chance of getting trunky! We keep getting surprised with a new assignment, and I am beginning to wonder if we will get them all done in time to catch a plane. Anyway, the Iceland volcano closed the air traffic here again, so maybe we won't be able to ever go home. Oh well, things could be worse.

We were planning on spending three days with the youth of the Muenchen stake (Not counting the day for setup), but then the assignment came to drive first to Vienna, Austria, then to St Gallen, Switzerland. For tax reasons we can't take computers from Germany into those countries, so they ordered computers to be delivered from a local dealer to those cities. We will go there and install the software on 6 new computers in each of these cities. We will be working in a church there. When finished we will distribute them to the Family History Centers that are on a list. That will give us enough work for more than a week, and someone else will have to take care of the Muenchen youth.

Which brings up thoughts of Elder and Sister Halliday.

Here is a picture taken of some of our special friends. Back row: Elder Halliday, Elder Howlett and Richard Walker. Front row: Sister Halliday, Sister Howlett and Elke Walker. On the floor are Erik Walker and Gary Walker. We had a Mexican dinner that night and everyone had a great time.

They have been in Germany as missionaries for half of what was to be an 18 month mission, and the mission closed their old assignment and reassigned them to work with us. They are to move into our desks, our house, and take over our car when we leave. They are getting close to the end of the same kind of training that we went through during our first couple of months. After they finish that we will have a chance to work with them for a while to let them know a little about what we have been doing before we turn it all over to them. So there is and will be no getting trunky. (They were supposed to start working on our travel plans for returning home about 4 months before the end, but we didn't even start on that until we had less than 3 to go. It hasn't been difficult to figure it out, however, since our visas expire the last day of our 23 month time, so they just had to figure out how to get us out of the country before then. To be on the safe side they scheduled us for about 4 days early. Lucky thing! our date was on Sunday and we didn't want to travel that day.

So we are just hurrying along trying to get things done before we have to pack it all in!

By the way, Elder Halliday is the older brother of the Elder Halliday who was my favorite companion 50 years ago, and he is the father of one of the members in the branch when I was Branch President. Small world!