1 January 2008 – journal

A new month and a new year. Hello 2008 – may you be as good to us as 2007.

Woke and after a struggle to convince myself that I needed to start the new year right by exercising I went to the gum for 45 minutes and worked up a good sweat. It is still very quiet there in the morning. I imagine that starting tomorrow a lot of folks will come in to try and work off the holiday weight gain.

We are making this our P-day as we are having president Marchant and his family over for dinner. Also Daisy is coming to clean the apartment and then help Mary with her English projects. We read from the Kitab Mormon and then I answered some e-mails from an assortment of people about projects we are in the middle of at this time. Also I caught up the last couple of days of this journal.

We had a relaxed day but it included cleaning out the freezer, doing 3 loads of laundry, and getting ready for company tonight. We managed to read again from the Kitab Mormon and study the PH and RS lesson for next year – it will be interesting to see what they use from the teachings of Joseph in these lessons. Mary and Daisy got all her activity pieces ready for laminating so by Wednesday night we should have everything we need for our first month of classes in Solo.

In the evening President and Sister Marchant and four of their children came over for dinner. Mary had prepared a great meal of chicken, greenbeans – it turned out the President loved greenbeans – baked potatoes, rolls from the Park Hotel, and I made a fruit salad. We had a nice meal and learned a lot about their children. One has just graduated from the BYU-P and is looking for a job. I gave him some ideas about what he might do to find a good one. For dessert we had brownies and ice cream cake. It was much too much food but it worked well.

While he was here, I talked to the President about the Couple’s Conference and we changed the dates of the program to make it so no one needed to fly on Sunday and we could get it done before the President and Sister Marchant had to fly back to Jakarta to meet the new, incoming missionaries. We still do not have where we are going to stay and we need to get that figured out by Monday or Tuesday at the latest.

We talked about the trip to the HK temple in January where all the Indonesian missionaries get their endowments. The Noordas are the senior couple so they will take them. The President said that he would OK us stopping off in HK for two or three days. He said that it is too bad that we would be going in June when it is hot and humid – as he said that we all laughed when we realized that is what it is always in Indonesia. Anyway we will plan to stop off there and go to the temple. If the Kanes have the same travel dates we will ask them to go also.

After the Marchants headed home Mary cleaned up and I washed all the dishes. We then read from the Kitab Mormon before gladly dropping into bed. I will not say it was a very spiritual first day of the month, but we did get a lot done on the HS English class, we continued to read in the scriptures, and we had a nice time visiting with the Marchants.