Oct 26

October 26, 2006

I couldn’t resist including pictures of the TV trays we bought at Wal-Mart on our way home. How do you know if you’re a redneck? When you buy pink plastic TV trays at Wal-Mart. We feel that we are now truly trailer trash. It’s not just that we actually purchased the things, but we were thrilled with them. We like them. Mostly because they only cost $6.00. The other picture is our cat, Cue (the Elders named him for Cibecue) sitting on the garbage can. That’s the first time I’ve ever seen him sit there. He usually sits on the porch railing or the folding chair we have outside to complete the redneck trailer trash look. So why the garbage can today?

Feels good to be trying to establish some sort of routine. The schedule we’re trying to keep for this first little while is: Exercise and study until lunch. Visit families until dark. Then home for dinner and our own time. It hasn’t worked yet, but today we’re pretty close for the first time. And no remarks from former missionaries as to whether or not they think this is a grueling schedule. It’s pretty rough for us old folks.

Thanks to our visit home to Logan, and Cade knowing exactly where to find the power cord for our printer, we now have the printer working. It’s a bit primitive, as I do have to attach the cable to print, but we’re trying to deal. So today I was finally able to print all my journal pages and put them in the binder.

We also paid our rent for the first time. The church charges us $275.00/month rent, then we pay all our utilities on top of that. I have some issues with the rent thing, but again we’ll deal. There’s an Elder Peart who handles the finances at the mission home. Because we never reported to the mission home, there were a number of things we didn’t know about, like paying rent. That’s fine, but Elder Peart has a way of telling us about things that makes us feel like we should have known already and we’re trying to rip off the church by making them pay for our bills. So he sends us a memo about all this, and nice Robert didn’t have any problem with the memo but rebellious me didn’t like the tone. So I replied to the memo when I mailed my rent check. I’m sorry to say my reply was pretty much the same tone as his memo. Basically I expressed the thought that neither my husband nor myself is 19 years old…that we’ve paid our own bills for quite some time now and are happy to continue to do so…that we took our own initiative to set up our phone, internet and TV and have already paid that bill…so thanks for offering to include the bill with our rent payment but no thanks because we’ve already handled it…and finally that we all by our little selves contacted the propane company, put the account in our own names, and have already paid to have it filled the first time. So if he’d like to include the electricity along with the rent voucher feel free but all else is done thank you very much. Then I repented, but not very sincerely.

We really did enjoy the conference last week, although we haven’t said much about it. When we got our mission call we struggled with the idea of going to a reservation. Then when I found we would be working with addiction recovery I was stunned. I truly hate the whole drinking scene. I avoid it and have run from it since I went to college. So to think my life would once again be dropped into the middle of that alcoholic world was almost more than I could handle. However, as I’ve gotten older I have come to understand the nature of alcoholism a little better and have often wished I could have helped my mother more instead of just being angry and running away from her. At the conference I finally saw that maybe since I couldn’t help my mother I can now help someone else with the same problem. I’m actually looking forward to starting the groups and see it now not as something to dread but as a time for me to heal as well as the people in the groups. I think moving to Logan was a beginning of this healing process even though I didn’t realize it until just this weekend. I ran away to Idaho many years ago and now I feel that I’m ready to come back home…not to Ogden but at least to an area where I have a lot of ties. While the purpose of this mission is to help others, I now realize that Heavenly Father also knew that I still need to do some healing and has sent me somewhere that I can accomplish that…at least I can if I stop writing nasty letters to the mission home and do what the Lord wants me to do here. I am ever amazed that God knows me far better than I know myself and that if I have faith and follow Him He will lead me to the things that are right for me.

We did more visiting this afternoon. We got some good contacts. At first I was discouraged because we couldn’t find any of the people we were looking for. The reason the Apaches was a nomadic tribe was because none of them can give decent directions. But we finally got a good contact and will go back there. We also found one of the active families we’d wanted to see. The Elders came tonight instead of last Monday because it was transfers and Elder Thompson has gone to Yuma. Elder Meeks is the new kid on the block. We weren’t here when they came and Itri said Meeks’ first words were, “Hey, this is not a typical missionary place.” When we asked why it was different they said, “Clean and smells good.” I was elated. That’s my idea of high praise.