Dec 1 07

December 1, 2007

And yet another day in Octopusland. We started with the potential of 4 baptisms and managed to get one of them to Show Low. The Elders had scheduled Brandy Tessay, Pauline Ivins, and Holyan and Malachi Dale. At 8:00 AM Robert started visiting families. Cecil Ivins said he would go to the baptism to represent the branch, as President couldn’t be there. Brandy is his granddaughter so he wanted to go with us anyway. Paula Ivins is very ill and said she couldn’t make it with her daughter, Pauline. We still don’t know if Paula has leukemia, but that’s the concern.

Since we had so many people we loaded the beast and headed to pick up Holyan and Malachi. Their mother came out and said Malachi was sick so they wouldn’t be going. Holyan is the one we cancelled during the monsoons and we just hated missing his baptism again because it has taken us this long to get it rescheduled from last July. So we asked his mother if he could still go and she was happy to do that. We wish we could just keep baptizing Holyan every few months as this seems to be so helpful to the Arizona drought. Every time he’s scheduled for baptism we have a major rainstorm. We forgot to mention that it rained all night and was still raining when we left for the baptism. Holyan told us that the water in the creek got up to the bridge again last night.

Then we went to get Brandy but no one was home. We thought maybe they were all at Cecil’s so we went there, but Cecil’s grandson said he had gone to Show Low. So we figured we’d meet them up there, but now since we only had Holyan we went back, unloaded the beast and took the truck.

When we got to Show Low, no Cecil. Robert talked to him later and he said no one was at the church. Never mind President Craig was having interviews today. And the Elders were there filling the font. We’re not sure what that was all about.

At any rate Robert baptized and confirmed Holyan. President Craig and his wife attended the baptism, as did Elder Itri. No one else came, most significantly no member of the Branch Presidency was there. Wilcocks were out of town and McNeils couldn’t come, so there were only 7 of us besides Holyan. But he was very enjoyable. He said he wished he could be baptized again he liked it so much. We had the cake we made yesterday and gave the leftovers to his family.

We arrived home in time to attend the Memorial Dinner for Daena Gooday, the little girl who was run over by her grandfather last December. They served a highly varied menu…beans, dry meat, corn, fry bread, tortillas, macaroni and cheese, potato salad and Wal-Mart cake and the ever-present jello and fruit salad in cool whip. In case you missed the sarcasm, this is exactly the same menu they have at every dinner around here.

Shawna sat by us at the dinner. She was scheduled to come for counseling at 5:00 but Byron called and rescheduled for Monday evening. So instead of counseling we finished getting ready for dinner tomorrow. I cut up stuff for stew so I’ll have something to serve Wilcocks for lunch, then made another cake and fixed the taco casserole as far as I could.

Earlier today Ricky called and said their roof was leaking and they couldn’t find President Bonito, as he would be the housing authority representative who should help them. Robert went on a mission to locate someone from housing that could look at their roof, but failed. No one was to be found. Later President called and said he couldn’t do anything until Monday anyway. Guess they’ll just have to leak all weekend because it’s still raining. We’ve never seen anyone as dedicated as President to keeping all his jobs within their proper time frames. He only does church work on Sundays, no matter what. He only does his housing authority job on weekdays from 8-4:30, regardless of the severity of the emergency. He’s amazing.