On Thursday April 30 2015 I celebrated my 77th birthday. The night before Mary gave me this beautiful picture of a family of warthogs. It was done by the son of a couple in our ward who is a very good artist. He burns the scene on leather. Mary gave him a choice of doing a scene with warthogs, guinea fowl or giraffes – I am glad he picked the warthogs because I have learned love these ugly beasts. Mary also gave me two pair of warm socks – I will soon need them, a thin tie – elders seem to be wearing them now – and a very warm maroon pullover sweater.

I decided that I wanted pizza for my birthday lunch so we went to Roman’s for the first time in our mission and got two large pizzas – it is the way the sell them. One pepperoni and one Hawaiian. I ate way too much and there was still plenty left over for breakfast, lunch a snack the next day. You can see Mary was thrilled that I wanted to take her picture while we at Romans.

On one of our trips during the day I noticed this grove of trees that was changing color as Autumn continues to move towards Winter. Not as golden as the aspen are during fall in Utah but still very beautiful.

I ended my birthday by us traveling down to Klerksdorp to do the year end audit. Mary came along to keep me company on the drive and she had her iPad for company while I was doing the audit. So started my 78th year on this earth…thanks to a loving Father in Heaven and His Son Jesus Christ it has been a great 77 years and I am sure that there are many more adventures and blessings in the year ahead.