Thursday, January 09, 2014

          The wind blew away but the misty rain remained, so I enjoyed my walk with an umbrella.  I noticed on my first round that the guard at the lower station had allowed two women onto the grounds who didn’t look like temple-going patrons.  They were casually dressed and had magnifying glasses hanging around their necks.  The first time I passed them they were walking slowly and really looking around—it could have been considered suspicious!

Finally, on the fourth round we stopped and the three of us chatted.  After the greeting in Spanish, I had to tell them, of course, that I didn’t speak Spanish and thought that would be the end of it, but low and behold the English came back to me—very good English.  One of the ladies was Latin, but the other looked North American and had no accent.  They each live in a housing development just north of the Temple. 

They were “birders” or bird watchers and told me all about the birds around the temple, including a rare North American bird they had sited atop “is that an angel up there?” to which I replied, “Yes, that’s the Angel Moroni.”  Obviously they weren’t members and didn’t know much about the Church.  We had a delightful conversation and they suggested several places of interest to visit while we are here.  They nearly fainted when I told them I had eight children!  Anyway, I wish I had been better prepared for my “missionary moment.”  It was a good first encounter and I hope they come back so we can visit again.  Paper and pen would have been nice to make note of all the bird names they gave me.  My memory is so short!

Glade carried his clothing bag home from the temple tonight and I asked him what was in it since we just finished laundering all of our temple clothing.  He said it was his jacket because it smelled like smoke!  “Oh, oh, what did you do?”  “I started a fire in the comedor!”   “Oh, no—the microwave!”  “Yep!”  He is so funny.  He at least took the granola bar he was heating out of the foil wrap and placed it on a napkin; but the time he set was way too long and the napkin went up in smoke!  We keep our lunch snacks in the fridge and the granola bars that are already hard and crunchy get extra hard when cold, so he was just trying to soften it up a little.  He had to eat around the hole that was left in the middle of it!  He is in the shower now washing the smoke smell from his hair.  It wasn’t really too bad, but it’s bad if it is your own hair!