Weakly news

Don't fall off your chair, but here's my second week in a row of posting.

This week I spent most of the week working late. I would come home for dinner, but then I would have to either go back to work or log in from home and ended up working until midnight most nights. That's getting old. I took a break Thursday night and participated in our first week of stake softball. Our team won.

Friday night was Music Theatre of Idaho's annual fund raising gala. They had a prime rib dinner and silent and live auctions. We didn't bid on anything, so we didn't buy anything. Well, they also have a dessert auction, so we did bid on that so that we could have dessert. It looked like they probably made some pretty good money on all the various goings-on.

Yesterday we worked most of the day: Liz in the yard, and me in the yard and in the house. What was I doing in the house? I was working on doing some wiring changes to our network and phone to accommodate our new phone system. We are now totally Qwest-free! A few weeks back I switched our internet to our local cable provider, and a little over a month ago I bought an Ooma Telo to provide our phone service. It took that many weeks to get our phone number ported over from Qwest to Ooma, partially because I forgot that 4 years ago I had Qwest put a freeze on our number to keep from having it slammed by some rogue phone company. What is Ooma, you might ask (at least you should ask)? It's a company that's offering voice-over-internet phone service for a very good monthly price: virtually free. You have to buy their hardware for around $200, but then all you have to pay on a monthly basis is the taxes and regulatory fees, which for us is around $3. For that you get unlimited nationwide long distance and local calling, including caller-id and call waiting. If you want a few other features like conference calling, etc. it's only $10/month. We're now going to start saving over $50 a month.

Today Liz and I both had unusual Sundays. Liz is currently serving as the Relief Society secretary in our ward. Yesterday she found out that both counselors in the presidency were out of town, and then last night the president called and said that she was sick (you could hardly hear her on the phone because her voice was so soft). The pianist and chorister were also both gone. Then, during Sunday School Liz realized that the teacher wasn't there, and found out that she was sick, too. They ended up combining with the High Priests for the lesson.

In the meantime, I was scheduled to speak in another ward. I arrived about 10 minutes before the meeting started, and was standing in the back of the chapel talking to the other high councilor who was my speaking companion, as well as one of the ward's bishopric counselors. We noticed that there was a brother sitting on the stand already that none of us recognized. I thought I had seen him before, but couldn't remember where. The other counselor in the bishopric eventually showed up on the stand and was talking to this person when my speaking partner and I went up to the stand. We still didn't know who he was until the counselor who was conducting started the meeting and announced that Elder Clark of the Seventy was presiding at the meeting. That's when I finally realized that it was Elder Kim Clark who is the president of BYU-I, where I had seen him conducting the commencement exercises last December when Anna graduated. Apparently he was in town for a wedding. So, I got to give my talk for a general authority. He didn't ask for any time to speak at the end of the meeting, and he didn't get up to correct anything, so apparently I didn't teach any false doctrine.

Well, hopefully you've recovered from the shock, and gotten back up off of the floor. Don't count on weekly posts, but I'll see if I can do better.