October 5, 2014

HAPPY BIRTHWEEK TO ROGER!

I think that it was a really good week of birthday celebrations for Roger.  He is REALLY old so it was important that it was celebrated.  70 yes! 70 years ago he was born.  And I am so glad he was born.  It was interesting to see how grateful all of this celebrating made me for Roger and his influence in my life.  I really feel blessed to have found him and be able to share our lives together.  It was a fun week!

It seems that the office would become mundane and boring at times.  But I haven't found that to be true yet.  It seems that there is always something new to be done or some new wrinkle.  This week was a doozy for that.  We realized on Monday that the mission president hadn't authorized the rent payments.  Rents are due on the 1st of the month and we were three days from that.  Many of the rentals offer no grace period so I freaked of the thought of 150 late payments!  I called the mission president - which was really hard because he was in the middle of a Zone Conference - and when I finally got in touch with him he said that he had tried all weekend to authorize the batch of rentals but the computer would time out or give error messages.  I quickly called Salt Lake (we are becoming great friends with the technical support office there) and asked them what to do.  They told me that I had to put the rents payments in several batches instead of just one and put them in to be authorized that way.  Sometimes the system doesn't handle huge batches.  I had to redo the whole thing and then hope it worked.  By the end of the day we had them authorized and I hoped that all would be OK.  But Friday we started getting calls from apartment owners saying that they didn't have their checks yet and that they would have to charge us late fees!  Oh boy!  Some will work with us but others are huge corporations and can't offer any leniency.  We are bracing for what that means tomorrow.  We might be running all around San Diego paying late fees to keep our missionaries from being put out.  We aren't sure why the checks took so long to get to San Diego but will be paying a price for it.  Wish us luck.

Thursday was Roger's birthday and it started out with the Knorr's and Soffe's singing several renditions of Happy Birthday during our morning devotional.  They are so much fun and make our service there full and good.  Then during the day many of the missionaries came by to wish him happy birthday and to leave all kinds of dumb things for him.  Crazy birthday cards, black balloons, etc.  Everyone was making sure to tell him that he is really old now.  And singing their favorite Happy Birthday song.

Happy Birthday luncheon!

We had a couple of elders who had planned to bring us lunch on Wednesday but I asked them to bring it on Thursday so that we could make Thursday more special.  They were all excited and made us a wonderful meal.  Chicken Alfredo, a yummy Caesar  salad,  and rolls.  It was great food and so nice of the missionaries.  We figure it is great "husband training" too.  

Oh we have fun!

We even took off about 4:00 and Roger was able to get a few hours in the surf before running home, having a VERY quick shower and taking off for our scripture class.

Roger gave a great lesson and we again celebrated with the members of the class giving him balloons etc and singing - again.  What fun!

Charles and SALMON!

Vera and Charles kept trying to figure out a time to pay their repects to Roger and we finally settled on Saturday evening.  So after conference we went over to their beautiful home and had a lovely dinner of salmon, potatoes, a wonderful salad, vegetables and yummy dessert.  All beautifully presented and prepared lovingly.

Dinner with Vera and Charles

My kind of birthday cake!  Yummm!

It meant a lot to both of us that they would go to that effort for Roger.  They are such great people.

We tried to help them find BYUTV on their TV and totally messed their TV cable system before we left.  We hope they figured it out so they could catch a bit of conference.  We love these people and are so glad that we were put in each other's path.

Wasn't conference great?!  We were able to catch all 10 hours of it.  I really enjoyed so many of the talks and can't wait to now start making them a part of my life.  I felt that I was given answers to many things that I have wondered about and ideas for others.  What a great gift we have to have this in our lives. Every six months we have a wide open window to heaven!

Pretty flowers