November 24 - 30 - Sunday to Saturday

The Cedar of Lebanon tree on Temple Square has nearly 75,000 lights, but it’s only lit every other year so the lights don’t damage the tree. The beloved tree has been growing on Temple Square for over 75 years, after a woman gave the seed to a grounds gardener – a seed she brought back from a visit to the Holy Land.  It is lit this year.  Here are two pictures. 

Cedar of Lebanon - taken Monday November 25 in morning 

Cedar of Lebanon taken Friday night November 29

Sunday Nov 24

We attended Music and the Spoken Word.  The theme was thanksgiving and gratitude.  We are so grateful to be able to witness the broadcast live each Sunday morning.  

Our branch meetings were spiritual and uplifting.  The subject was gratitude for our Sacrament meeting and all three talks were excellent.  The subject for our Priesthood / Relief Society lessons was President Eyring's talk to the women at the last conference titled “Covenant Women in Partnership with God”.

We attended our Fifth-Floor dinner social from 5 - 6:30pm.  Kathy Dahlin visited us for about an hour after the dinner social.  She and her husband Terry were our Zone leaders and we were assistant zone leaders and became good friends.  We will try to visit them before we leave.

Monday Nov 25

We attended the mission devotional at 7:30am and learned about the training zone.  We are acquainted with many of the missionaries who serve in the zone and almost ended up serving in that zone.  We are very happy that we were assigned where we are serving.

We traveled to Tooele to visit Don Attridge.  He has wanted to show us his Christmas decorations.  He keeps his apartment decorated all year.  He has one room he calls his Christmas room.  Here are some pictures taken in the Christmas room.

Elder Tolman and  Don Attridge

Greeting cards printed from Don's water color paintings

It was snowing by the time we left I-80 to drive into Tooele on the say to Don's place.   The roads were accumulating snow and were snow covered on the way back to I-80 from Tooele.  We saw one accident and were careful driving.  Having new tires on our Chevy Impala helped.

We had a good planning meeting at our Zone leadership meeting with final preparations for the Thanksgiving dinner which is for the Young Elders and those Senior missionaries who won’t be with family on Thanksgiving.

At 4:30pm, we enjoyed dinner at the Conference Center West Foyer followed by mission conference in the Assembly Hall on Temple Square.  Dinner consisted of salad, mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy, green beans, cranberries, turkey, and rolls.  We had some good desserts as well.

The mission conference was led by President and Sister Fenn.  The subject was The Doctrine of the Family.  The pattern of marriage is described in the scriptures.  The covenant of Celestial marriage was originally made with Adam and Eve.  They were married by the power of the priesthood. They were united and labored together.  The Lord’s counsel on marriage is summarized in Doctrine and Covenants 42:22 "Thou shalt love thy wife with all thy heart, and shalt cleave unto her and none else."

Tuesday Nov 26

It was 21 degrees this morning and stayed at or below freezing all day.   We were not very busy in the library today with not many guests on our floor. I think the cold and the holiday week is affecting the number of guests.

Yesterday Don Attridge indicated that he would be in the library today, but he stayed home as I didn’t see him today.  I did a little research for him in case he was able travel to the library.  I researched a cousin family for him.  The husband and wife were on the tree but no children.  I added their six children and reserved ordinances for two of the sons.  I will show him what I was able to find when he visits the library next time.

We stopped by at Deseret Book on the way home for lunch and purchased the DVD “Christmas Jars”.

In the afternoon I was able to help couple who came to the floor and started asking some questions about what is available on third floor.  I told them about the books and how they are used.  Their names are Kim and Tracy and are church members from Northern California.  They are excited to have a temple nearby in Yuba City.  We sat down at computers and I showed them some things about FamilySearch.  They both use FamilySearch for their efforts with family history.  I helped Kim figure out how to access and use his free ancestry.com account.  I showed them both the fan chart and how to see birth countries, photos, and sources.  They thanked me for showing these.

I also had the chance to visit with Noelani Mateaki. I really enjoy visiting with her.  Her full name is Sharon Noelani Webster Mateaki.  She hasn’t been to the library for more than a month and it was good to see her again.

I helped Sister Godfrey and Sister Chabries with some questions that that had on the tier training.  They are making good progress and should be able to get their purple pins.

We went to the temple after our library shift and attended a sealing session at about 4:30pm.  We were able to complete two couple sealings and sealing six daughters to their parents.  We completed the sealing for three of the daughters in the same family and two of the daughters in another family together.   This was a special experience.  Our sealer was Elder Oscarson (husband of Bonnie Oscarson, former General Young Women President).  In addition to being a Sealer, he works three half-day shifts at the Family History Library on the International Floor with expertise in Swedish research.  The temple was really busy today.  As we were leaving we walked by the room where the 6pm Endowment session starts and it was nearly full.  People were in line hoping to make that session and will need to wait until the 7pm session.  The Salt Lake Temple is only open in the morning on Wednesday (10am session is the last one) and closed on Friday.    

Wednesday Nov 27

We slept in until about 6:30am.  It is different for the next few days as we won’t be going to work at the library until Saturday at 1pm.  Both Laura and Julianna called us this morning and we enjoyed talking to them.  We picked up a rental car which we had reserved to go out to see Byron and Peggy and decided to use it anyway as we are wanting to drive some mid-size SUV’s before purchasing one.  We rented a Mitsubishi Outlander.

We ate lunch at Arby’s and used a coupon to buy two roast beef sandwiches, two curlie fries, two drinks and six mozzarella sticks.  We stopped there on the way to see the movie “It Is a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” starring Tom Hanks.  It was well done and a very enjoyable movie.  We are glad that we went.  Here is a brief description.  “A journalist's life is enriched by friendship when he takes on an assignment profiling Fred Rogers. Based on the real-life friendship between journalist Tom Junod and television star Fred Rogers.”  Here is a brief critic review with which I agree.  “Many a movie will make you laugh or cry or think. But very few make you want to be a better person.”

I gave my brother Byron a call and we talked for nearly two hours.  It was really good to get a chance to visit with him since we were not able to drive to Jensen, Utah due to the weather.

We put together a puzzle.  It was a two in one puzzle.  The first step was to separate the pieces as the pieces from the two puzzles were mixed together.   We put the top puzzle together today and the second one together on Thursday morning.  It took us just under and hour to finish the second one.  I don’t know how long the first one took.  Here is a picture of the two puzzles. 

Thursday Nov 28

Happy Thanksgiving.  I woke up at 5:30am thinking about all my many blessings and didn’t go back to sleep.  We woke up to snow.  It snowed several inches by 6am and by 9am we had at least another inch.  I went outside at about 8am and took some pictures then walked to the temple and took some more.  

Sister Tolman baked some cookies and I brought in our Christmas tree from our storage shed.  I set up the tree and put on a few ornaments.

We went to my sister Gerri Coombs for Thanksgiving dinner.  She had most of her family there.  We had a well prepared and tasty dinner of turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, corn, sweet potatoes and apples, etc.  We had pecan pie and a date bread for dessert.  We enjoyed visiting.  Dinner was at 5pm and we got home just after 8pm. 

Elder Tolman with Sister Gerri and her news great grandchild

We talked to Becky and Christina today and enjoyed visiting with them.

Friday Nov 29

We left at about 11am to travel to Orem to spend time with Sister Tolman’s brother David and his wife Shelly. We got there at just after noon and stayed until about 4pm.  We had a very enjoyable visit with them at their condo.  We had lunch and then played a game of Five Crowns and then another new game with them.  It was very different type of strategy game but it was fun to play.  

Elder and Sister Tolman, Shelly and David Senior

While we were there it began to snow and by the time we left it had snowed several inches.  Here we are getting the snow off the car.  

The road near their condo was snow covered and there was snow on the roads until we reached the I-15 Freeway.  The freeway had some snow but wasn’t too bad until we reached what is called the point of the mountain right between Utah Valley and Salt Lake Valley.  This area is higher in elevation than the valleys and the snow was a lot worse.  We were able to negotiate the roads but we were surely glad that we had the SUV as it handled really well in the snow.  This morning I had thought about going some where to test how well the Outlander did in the snow.  We didn’t have to do that as the snow came to us.

We stopped at Smith’s on the way home for some food shopping and to fill the gas tank for the rental car as we need to return it Saturday morning.

It had snowed several inches in Salt Lake so when we got back to the apartment, I went to move our car and needed to clean off about four inches of snow.  We had to park the car in an area without covered parking.

I suggested that we go to Temple Square to see the lights as this is the first official day of Christmas lights on Temple Square.  Today’s snow stayed on the branches of the trees and made the lights really beautiful.  We walked around temple square and took a lot of pictures.  We stopped at Desert Book and then at the Family History Library before returning to our apartment. 

Saturday Nov 30

Wow, it is the last day of November.  We woke up to some snow flurries and it was cold enough this morning that the snow was sticking to the pavement when we took the SUV back to Budget Car Rental at about 8:30am.  It stopped snowing and the sun came out by about 10am.  However, it did not warm up today and will be cold tonight with a low of 16 degrees.

We finished the cleaning the apartment this morning so we almost have our apartment ready for our MTC social on Monday night.

We started at the library at 1pm. A former Young Elder missionary, Kevin Rast, stopped by to find out some specific death information for his great-grandmother who died in 1944 in California.  We found a  California death index but to see the birth certificate, he will need to order one from the state. 

I helped John Woodruff who is visiting from Sacrament, California.  He wanted to find out more about his great-grandfather on his father’s side.   Before we set up an account for him, I suggested that we look under my FamilySearch account to see what ancestors we could find.  We first looked for his grandfather.  We were able to find him on the tree even though we had his spouse's last name wrong.  We looked at this grandfather’s children and we found John’s father.  We next looked for ancestors on his mother’s side and the same thing happened.  We found his mother’s parents and then she showed as a child.  So both parents were on the tree but they were not connected. 

John was very excited to get going with his own account.  We got his account setup using his email for verification and then attached his parents to him and we had his tree in place.  We saw a couple of gaps and were able to extend one of his lines with some English research.   We downloaded the mobile app to his android phone.  We then tried “Relatives Around Me” and found out that we are eighth cousins.

Sister Tolman and I helped Nathan and his girl friend Katy.  They are here to see the lights at Temple Square.  Katy just went to the temple today and received her Endowment.  I showed Nathan how to use Ordinances Ready and also how to use Descendancy Research to find relatives to add to the tree and be able to complete temple ordinances for them.  Sister Tolman helped Katy with some English research for her family.

At the last minute, I young man probably about 12 years old needed some help with his FamilySearch account.  He showed me his tree on his phone app and then we logged onto his account on FamilySearch.  He had created several duplicates for his living parents and living grandparents. We straightened that out.  Now all he needs to do is get some information from his father's account and he will be able to connect back to his ancestor Parley P Pratt.