24 December 2007 – Monday
I woke at 5:30 and was at the gym 20 minutes later. It was good to have a strong workout. For the first 25 minutes I had the gym to myself – I guess a lot of people have left for the holidays. The attendant asked if I was leaving and I told him that we were here until June. I am feeling much better but it does not appear that my stomach is 100% – there are still times when it does not feel right.
We had a nice Skype connection with Tom and his family this morning. The increase in bandwidth seems to have helped some in how long we could stay on. We use the cameras on both ends so we could see the kids and they could see us. William and Kelli are both getting big and William is doing well with his talking. They say he is getting into everything and even tried to improve one of their paintings. It was great to see and talk to them even if it was for only a few minutes.
Mary got busy baking carrot cakes for the mission party tomorrow. I convinced her to make two so the elders could have all they wanted. She is also going to make some rice krispy snacks. Some of the elders – especially elder Smith – really liked the last batch she did. While she was doing that I worked on this journal – I had gotten behind again. Then while the first cake was baking we read from the Kitab Mormon.
It is very clear in Jakarta today. The lack of traffic over the last few days and a nice stiff wind seems to have blown most of the haze away. When it is like this, Jakarta is a nice city to live in. Unfortunately there are probably only 15 holiday days when it is like this.
We had Sam come by so we could go to the store and then drop off the cakes at the mission home so we do not have to carry them in a cab tomorrow. I expected the traffic to be very busy – and it was around Carrefore – but it turned out to be quite light and so we zipped through our errands. The Davis were already at the mission home when we got there so we had a short but nice visit with them and the Walkers before heading back home. The Davises brought pineapples this time – we got two so Sam could have one. They are really heavy ones.
The rest of the day was spent not doing a whole lot. Mary did some more baking and then went and passed out plates of cookies and banana bread to the neighbors. We also read more from the Kitab Mormon. I answered a couple of e-mails from students for our Intensive English Class. Hopefully there will be six and not five or seven but I am still not sure at this time. There was a little studying from the scriptures but mainly we just relaxed for the rest of the day. We did watch another Christmas story on Hallmark – at least Mary watched and I dropped in from time to time.