Yesterday was a very lovely day and a busy one as well. We spent the day with three church couples - at different times of the day. We started out sleeping in 'til a very respectable 'sleeping in' time - 9:30am! :-) Dad and I rarely are able to sleep in (when we have days we don't have to get up early) and that's annoying! :-) Our first visit was with Chris and Christine - Christine hurt her leg a few weeks ago at church and she is basically homebound - I have been trying to connect with her to come over and visit. On Sunday at church I asked Chris if I could just drop by and he said to just let him know when I would be coming and I said how about Monday at 11am. When we got there, Cherylyn, the Relief Society president was there mopping the kitchen floor. The four of us (Chris, Christine, Dad and I) started chatting and Cherylyn joined us when she was done mopping. It was lovely to just sit and chat with our friends - you just don't get to do that much at church.
We had to leave there at 1pm as Geoff and Robyn were meeting us at our house for 1:30pm for another scooter practice session. Geoff has been so good to us asking us if we want to go for rides and giving up his time to follow us around and giving us hints (well, giving me hints anyway :-) The day was so beautiful yesterday - beautiful blue sky with some light fluffy white clouds and really warm - a perfect day for a ride. Dad feels confident enough and didn't think he needed a practice, but I suggested he take one more ride downtown to get one more turn in heavy traffic, so he went first. I needed to practice right turns and so I rode around a VERY large block a number of times to do that. The key is to make sure I am as close to the middle line when I make the turn (last week, I turned right from the middle of the lane and Geoff said that a cop might call me up on that). We are going to go out again hopefully on Wednesday - because I haven't driven much around HB, I don't know it very well and so, rather than be nervous today about riding because I'm not sure where I'm going, Dad and I are going to map out a route for me to go and Geoff and Robyn and Dad will follow me around on Wednesday if it's a nice day and given me some practice riding in an area which is a bit busier than the streets I have been riding around so far. When we got home from riding, Geoff asked us if we were still planning on taking a walk along the beach. When we said 'yes' (there is no way we weren't going to enjoy this perfect day some more), they said that they would meet us down there and we could walk along together. We thought that was a great idea - we get along really well with Geoff and Robyn and were happy to go along and have some more time to chat while we walked along the beach on this beautiful day!
On our way home from the beach, I asked Dad to stop at the home of the Gilbert family. Their daughter, Bethany, was assigned a talk on Sunday and her mom, Haidi, was home sick and I wasn't sure if her dad, Alistair, would have seen the piece of paper with the assignment on it on Sunday. Now, to preface this, I gave each parent a three month schedule with a piece of magnet on the back to put on their fridge so they all had plenty of notice as to when their child would have an assignment for Sharing Time and what they would be asked to do. Anyway, their son, Kyle, had been assigned to give a talk a couple of weeks ago and hadn't prepared it, so I wanted to make sure that both parents knew about Bethany's assignment and knew what the talk was supposed to be about. Haidi and Alistair invited us in to visit with them and we stayed for almost an hour. They are originally from South Africa and then moved to Great Britain in 1996. They then moved to Australia about a year ago. It was really nice to sit with them and get to know them a little better. We look forward to having them over to dinner and getting to know them even more.
Today, I was back to my volunteering - Louise was very pleased when I showed up. She had a lot of assessment which needed doing and so I spent most of the day working on that with the children in her class. I also spent a bit of time in Rachel's grade one class. She is the teacher whose class I wanted to take over when she goes on long service leave later in the year, but she had someone else in mind and didn't seem too pleased that I was asking about taking the contract (before I knew she had someone else for the job), and she hasn't really been all that friendly towards me. Well, today, she was very appreciative of my help - I find the grade one teachers a little hard to read - well, some of them anyway.
Dad spent the day doing Census stuff. He has seven areas that he is in charge of and today he spent the day going around one of the areas to check that the number of dwellings he had been told were in the area, actually were - he found in this area that there were more dwellings than posted which means there are more houses for the collectors to go to. Dad also had to go into all of the businesses in the area to make sure that no-one lives on the premises.
The missionaries came over for dinner tonight - Tuesday night is our regular night to have them over. It's becoming a shorter time to eat dinner, though, as they now have a meeting with the Bishopric at 6:15pm whereas it used to be about 6:45pm, so we might have to think about a different night to have them. We made a delicious dinner of chicken fajitas and started to play a game of cribbage. Elder Richardson is playing well (he's my partner) and Elder Paki is really catching on quickly (although I had to help both of them with one of their hands as they weren't sure what to throw away). They left in time to get to their meeting and Dad left soon after that to get to his meeting which starts at 6:45pm with the Bishopric, the Ward Mission Leader (our friend, Geoff) and the Elder's Quorum President (our friend, Chris). At the meeting, they discuss the needs of the people in the ward. Generally, the meeting goes for an hour, but they are taking a little longer at the moment as they are trying to seek out those people who are on the ward list who no-one knows, so that they can find out if they are still in the area.
No comments:
Post a Comment