21 November 2007 – Wednesday

I woke up not feeling well, but as the day went on things got better. Instead of going to the gym, I spent the time reading PMG. After breakfast we read from the Kitab Mormon.

As I was writing in my diary for yesterday, I had the feeling that elder and sister Walker should invite the Tobings to come to the English branch Thanksgiving get together on Saturday afternoon. So I called them and I think they will at least give it a try.

Sam picked us up and we went over to see our friend Rudi. He is the 74 year old Chinese fellow that we made friends with when the elders taught him a couple of times. We have not seen him in a number of months so it was nice to find out what has been going on in his life. One thing is that he seems to have lost quite a lot of money in the U.S. mortgage funds. He was confused as to why they had fallen so badly and I tried to explain it to him. He said that the losses were really bothering him until he started thinking about what it really meant as far as what is of greatest values. He is quite religious and once he started thinking in those terms he decided that he still had plenty to live as well as he wants so why let it cause him so much distress. I told him that was the right idea and that it fit in right with what Jacob 2 says in the Book of Mormon. So we had a good visit for about an hour and then headed back to the apartment.

The rest of the day has just flown by. Most of my time has been spent working on some lesson helps for Mary’s English class for the service center staff. We are creating special business vocabulary lessons for them. I think we can use some of them for other classes. Also I sent out a number of e-mails to let the couples know how we are planning to reach elder Subandriyo’s English goal.

Mary has been busy getting some things ready for the dinner at the mission home tomorrow. She made a carrot cake for one of the elders who had never heard of a carrot cake before. She is also make candied sweet potatoes – we think they are sweet potatoes.

For some reason I crashed at about 8:00 – just fell asleep on the bed while studying Indonesian. Of course I woke up at around 2 in the morning and stayed up trying to read a conference talk until after 3:30 when I managed to fall back asleep.