Week 72 from Mexico

9 Jan 2011

This has been a very slow week. Not a lot to tell about.  We were on the morning shift at the temple, which is really quiet.  We had a fairly good amount of patrons come for the 9am session during the week. And with our new policy of not using temple workers to do baptisms and confirmation it is becoming the norm of no baptisms in the mornings.  Bro. Jimenez, who was the brother who usually would come and baptism a thousand or more each morning has been here every day doing an endowment session instead and doesn't seem to mind the change.  The men are doing a lot more initiatories now.  Saturday was unusually quiet. There were no buses all morning so there were hardly any patrons for the sessions and no youth groups so  there weren't any baptisms all morning. Three buses finally did arrive about 12 or so in the afternoon and we had some youth groups who did some baptisms but they were limited to only five names each unless they were family names. 

On Wednesday morning Sister Machuca was going to have me help her rotate the new baptismal overalls that had arrived with the ones they are replacing until she realized that we needed to have the washing machine reprogrammed to not add Clorox to the loads. They have determined that the Clorox was what was causing the garments to turn slightly yellow so from now on we will not be adding Clorox to the washers. 

We finally got one of the items that was sent for my birthday but not the one with the camera in to. We got an envelope with pictures and hand made birthday cards from our son, Jarom, and his family who sent it on November 4th, which meant it took 2 months to get here.  Maybe there's still hope that the package with the camera will still get here but I'm afraid that it might have gotten stolen.  That makes me feel so bad because my kids all sacrificed and chipped in to buy it as a surprise.  Thanks kids anyway.  I appreciate the effort and thoughtfulness.

We found out this week that the temple will be closed for their summer maintenance from June 28th thru July 11th so that means we will still be while it's closed.  Maybe we can plan a nice trip to do some sight seeing during that time.  We  will only be here another two weeks after it reopens.  Our mission ends on July 24th which is a Sunday so we will be leaving on July 25th. We plan to do some sight seeing on our way home and visit a few temples on the way so it may take a week or two to get home.

Tomorrow the Machuca's are having our FHE senior missionary group to dinner at the home.  That should be a very nice evening that I'm looking forward to.