Heart Attack!

We suffered a heart attack! It came in a big white envelope from our grandchildren full of paper hearts. It was good to know we are still loved.

Heart attack envelope

Hearts taped to our door

 So what does one do in a slow village during the winter? (We are told it really picks up in the summer from tourists). We have a less-active member who is deaf. We checked out a book on American Sign Language (ASL) from the library, but learned that unless you are fluent, good luck. We decided to go the "high tech" route. We downloaded an application for the iTouch that can translate spoken words into text. Given Sister Wheeler's experience with speech recognition while learning Portuguese through Rosetta Stone we are a little hesitant to use the downloaded program. It actually understands English better than Portuguese. We don't want to accidently swear at a member. It ends up he wasn't home, so we will have to try it out another day.

We saw a robin this week. Does that mean spring is coming? Not when people still have their Christmas decorations up. Actually, we really had a big snowstorm on Saturday.

Does a robin mean spring?

Merry Christmas anyway

We decided to go to a different village each day instead of making the long round in one day. Actually we visited (or tried to visit) so many people last week, there are few left. On Tuesday we visited Doris and Eileen in Marmora. They called us on Friday asking why we were late for dinner. We informed them that we were scheduled for Thursday next week. Things can get confusing at times.  It turned out that we had a mission fast on Friday. There was a bad accident at an intersection in Toronto and a car was knocked onto the sidewalk and hit two pedestrians, one of which was an Elder. He had broken bones and head injuries and was in the ICU.

We had our regular district meeting on Wednesday. There will be a few changes for next week (Elder King will be going home and Sister Arnold has been here for a long time). District pictures were in order which meant lining cameras up with a delay and running to get into the picture. At one time there were 5-6 cameras taking pictures at the same time. Needless to say, some pictures were skewed.

Sister Arnold setting up cameras

Our district:
Back row:Sisters Arnold, Sister Jungert; Us; Elder Stubbs
Front row: Elder Anderson, Elder Kwok, and Elder King (almost gone)

 We had dinner with the Havelock Holts on Wednesday evening. We decided we could write a book about branch members that could rival "Baptists at our Barbeque". We have some very interesting personalities in the branch.

Thursday we hit our half-way mark on our mission. It makes us wonder what we will face during the next nine months. We were asked to help in the Family History center since Mary had a doctor's appointment. Fortunately Joan was there and knew what she was doing. We were told about a community choir that would be practicing at 8:15 PM on Thursday. Since we were invited by the Campbellford Holts we decided to try it. We showed up early, but the choir was already practicing and the Holts weren't there. We found out later that the church choir practices until 8:15 when they are joined by members of the community. The Holts didn't get there until after we left - maybe next week.

The weather was looking good on Friday so we decided to take a little walk (that turned out being a hike). We returned to Ferris Provincial Park and took some new trails. We saw two of the main features of the park - Ranney Falls (not much water) and the suspension bridge.

Trail sign

Ranney Falls

Suspension bridge

Sister Wheeler on the bridge

Ice falls along the river

On the boardwalk

 On Friday evening we went to the church to decorate for the branch Valentines dinner. This is an activity where the men cook for the women in the branch. The party was on Saturday night. The dinner was good with salad, roast beef, baked potatoes, vegetables, rolls (including gluten-free buns), and the typical dessert: vanilla ice cream with jello and fruit cocktail (all in the same bowl, of course).

Pres Holt and Gordon carving the beef

The party decorations
They needed a high priest to hang the things from the ceiling

 Along with the food came the entertainment from the Campbellford Holts (our musical family). A vagrant (Elder Wheeler) crashed the party and joined them on a couple of musical numbers. Maybe no one will be at church tomorrow. We had four nonmembers attend the party.

Timma, Debbie, and Tim Holt

I didn't know they meant a "tape recorder"

No, this is not a harmonica - it's a mouth organ!

 It's always good to have visitors on Sunday. We had three people from the stake, the district clerks and our district council representative. Sister Wheeler was asked to lead the music in Sacrament meeting at the last minute (and didn't even have time to practice the hymns). Elder Wheeler substituted in blessing the sacrament, but he had cue cards.

As you can tell (by Elder Wheeler's humor), it's been a slow week in Trent Hills, but we keep on going.