Sunday June 3, 2018

These pictures show some of the animals around here.  The first picture is a snapping turtle trying to cross the road just down from our house.  They are actually quite common around here.  We have even swerved to avoid hitting one on the freeway on our way to church in Quincy.  The second is of a moth that these boys were running around with at the picnic for Memorial Day in the town square.  They thought that would have me screaming but I took their picture instead!  Now if it would have been a snake, I would have been running in total panic....LOL !!  They didn't know that or they probably would have gone and found one !!   Mischievous little guys...I kind of like those kind of boys!!  I wonder why??

I am going to share some of our day-to-day activities.  We have prayer meeting each morning at 7:00 a.m. with all of the other FM missionaries and with the employees for NRI (Nauvoo Restoration Inc.)  where we receive announcements, and a spiritual thought for the day and then we dismiss and report to our assigned departments for specific assignments for the day.  Sis. Paxman reports to the painting shop and we have a team that work together on various projects.  The past two weeks have been devoted to restoring the Sarah Granger Kimball home.  It is the cutest home and we completed that on Friday.  We repainted the interior which sounds easy but requires different techniques because of the need to restore it to the kind of condition that was authentic to the era.  Needless to say, I am learning alot.! We also painted the exterior.  Elder Paxman has his own shop and assignments which he goes and does independently.  This week has consisted of repairing numerous (too many to count) picket fences.  They just rot off at the ground and so NRI have bought alot of cypress trees that fell down in Florida with the storms there and are shipped here.  They plank out the trees and have their own kiln to dry the wood properly.  Apparently cypress wood does not rot! So then Elder Paxman cuts the planks into pickets of the appropriate length and paints them , then proceeds to fix the fences in need of repair.  I helped him one afternoon when it was "mega-hot" outside.  He brought the pickets into the paint shop and I had to quit at Sarah Granger Kimball because we were working outside and it got too hot.  So, we painted the pickets in the comfort of an air-conditioned shop!! Another exciting development happened this week.  The #1 employee for NRI is Jordan and he was gone for a couple of days.  This is not unusual as he often has meetings to attend in Salt Lake City but this week he shared with us that the reason that he was gone was that he has been given responsibility for the upkeep and restoration of Independance, Far West, Adam-ondi-Ahman, & Haun's Mill in Missouri.  I was excited about that and would really like to go and see these significant places in Church history.