August 22-24 - Wednesday to Friday

Wednesday thru Friday August 22 to 24

We continued our work on the 17 on-line training modules and we both completed them Friday morning.  We completed the assessments by just after noon Friday. We are so happy to have completed this training so we can start helping others next week. We thought that this might take two weeks but we finished in one week.  

Our mission so far has been lots of training with our first week at the MTC, the next two weeks in the training center at the Joseph Smith Memorial Building and a week of training at the Family History Library.  Each of the trainings were different and we greatly benefited from each one.  We left home on July 28 and here we are four weeks later at our home (shown below) for the next year and a half.  Our address is 185 N West Temple Apt 508, Salt Lake City, UT 84103.

West Temple Apartments

On Thursday night from 6:30-9pm we enjoyed a dinner and get together at the Garden Park Ward (this was my ward growing up and where Sister Tolman and I had our wedding reception) with a lot of the guys I went around with during my growing up years.  They were all members of the Garden Park Ward.  The group gets together once a month for lunch and once a year in the summer they get together with spouses and have a fun evening. Tables were set up on the west lawn area.  

Garden Park Ward 

Those who were there included Glenn Mortensen, my best friend in my younger years and Ken Jarvis my best friend during high school and college.  Others there were Tim and Owen Lunt and their wives, Norm Ashton and his wife (we worked with them at the Mesa Arizona Temple Visitors Center), Marty Manning, Richard Green (Sister Tolman's 2nd cousin), Mike Koplin, Geoff & Lynette Orme, Spence Mortensen, Doug Mortensen, Dave Cockayne and others.  It was wonderful to visit with Glenn and his wife Martha.  I haven’t seen them for a lot of years.  

Garden Park Ward Bishopric - note the 2nd Counselor

On Friday we completed an on-line meeting and phone call to get our Medicare plan changed. Since we moved out of Maricopa County our Medicare plan with Cigna won’t work anymore.  The meeting was scheduled between 1:45 and 4:45 pm Friday so we needed to miss a half day at the library.  It was good to get this item completed.  We didn't get the call until about 3pm and we finally finished about 4:30pm.

I texted back and forth with Ira Gentry to arrange for us to see him on Saturday September 1. I have visited him for over 10 years during the time he was incarcerated.  He is now in a half-way house in Salt Lake City (he is here since his wife moved here earlier this year). I haven’t seen him since the end of April of this year. 

We took a walk around Temple Square and walked through both the North and South Visitors Centers.  We met a young sister missionary who is serving from Thailand.  She remembers David Senior when he was mission president there and he interviewed her for a temple recommend.   

We had a pretty sunset. Here it is as viewed from our apartment.