Monday, February 18, 2013

We have the day off because of President's Day!  Because our zone supports a department without the Church Employment System (paid employees) and they have today off, we also get it off.  We've been in our zone for 2 weeks now.  (49 weeks to go but whose counting!!) Our zone's work is to support the Church department called Information Pipeline Organization.  Their responsibility is to take raw data - usually films with pages of information that have been taken from old records around the world - get it into a format that it can be sent out to the indexers.  Indexers look at each record and input any data that identifies people - names, dates, families, events, etc.  Once the information input into the system, then it all has to be checked for accuracy (data analysis), which is a several step process.  When it is through with the data analysis process, it is released to the public via Family Search or Family Tree.  It can be very boring to very interesting, depending on the records.  I can't say I love the work, but we are surrounded by interesting people who are wonderful to work with.  The sister who works on the other side of my cubicle is from North Carolina and has a beautiful southern accent.  I love listening to her speak.  I met a distant cousin who works in the zone and we were able to swap stories about our common ancestor.  So we are having lots of good experiences meeting new people.

For those of you who know me and what I think about what is happening in Idaho politics concerning education, you might be interested to know that the very first missionary I met our first day in the mission is a recently retired Idaho legislator who served on the House Education Committee!  I just about swallowed the cookie I was eating whole when he told me who he was!  The good thing is he is such a nice person and we've gotten to know him and his wife well, so I can't harbor any bad feelings toward him!  I'm taking a sabbatical from any politics this year!!

We are still loving living right downtown.  We spend alot of time walking.  I feel time we spend most of our time in tunnels, elevators, and on sidewalks.  But, we're getting to know where we can go to get what we need.  We'll go a whole week and not even go down to the parking garage. 

I've been trying to download some pictures but I can't seem to get it to work today!  Anyone know how to download a picture from a file?? I've tried the download button, copy and paste from the file, Nothing!  Boy, do I love computers!!!

I have to tell you about the strangest thing that happened last night!  Dale has an old book that tells about his great great uncle, Joseph Standing.  He was a missionary in the 1870's in Georgia and was killed by a mob because he was a Mormon.  There's a monument about his martyrdom in Georgia and in the Salt Lake Cemetery, the one I wrote about in a previous blog.  I was looking at the book last night and opened it up where there were 3 small old pieces of paper that look like clippings from newsletters.  As I looked at the first one, I noticed a item about an Elder C.W. Bodily performing baptisms.  This item's byline said Chicago.  I thought we had gotten the paper mixed up because  my grandfather, Christopher William Bodily, went on a mission back in the northern Midwest states.  I turned the paper over and there was an article about Joseph Standing's martydom years before. Dale's grandmother had clipped this article out of some newsletter because it was about her uncle and it just happens to have a item mentioning my grandfather on the other side!  This side of Dale's family lived in the Tremonton area in Utah which is in the Northern Utah.  My grandfather lived in Eastern Utah so there no way it was a community newsletter.  Can you believe that coincidence?  I'm still shaking my head wondering how that happened!  This family history stuff is really getting interesting!