It has been a good week with a number of firsts or new things (and a last!) for us. Our new missionary is Elder Rogers. He is a nephew to Scott & Alana Rogers in our home stake. It's a small world in the church! He and Elder Law both spoke in church yesterday and did a great job. The brand new investigator who came to church was well taught - along with the rest of us. Speaking of teaching, Gary taught the Institute lesson W & TH nights - about the Saints leaving Nauvoo and struggling through Iowa. We each taught one lunch lesson and had 15 students each time, including one non-member and one formerly active member.

Friday night we attended the annual "Evening with a General Authority" for all seminary and institute teachers and their spouses - a first for us. It was a satellite broadcast from the SL Tabernacle where Elder Oaks spoke. He gave a great talk about how Latterday Saints think differently than the world about many things - especially the family. He admonished us to let Christ be our secure foundation, the scriptures and teachings of the prophets our anchor, and gospel truths our guide. We've also heard some excellent talks and interviews on the Mormon Channel this week.

Our last quarterly senior missionary gathering was on Saturday at the mission home. We met two great new senior couples. One lives an hour from the mission office and will commute to serve there. The other is doing digitizing and archiving at the Fort Wayne Family History Library. One book recently digitized had been looked at 4 times in the past 25 years. Now it is getting 4,000 views a month! The work at the library is hastening family history research across the world. We drove to the Indianapolis Temple site after our senior gathering. Work has begun! There is a fence around the site and lots of heavy equipment there.

We are already looking forward to coming back when this temple is completed. We made it back from Indy in time to bake pizzas for the Branch Game Night at the church. Basketball and volleyball were the main attractions but some of us played board games too. Planned by the ward mission leader, members were asked to invite a friend. We did have 4 non-members there. It was a fun evening.

We were invited to dinner with a family who emigrated from Australia years ago (but still have thick accents.) Two of the daughters attend Institute every week. They made "pavlova" for dessert - a traditional Australian dessert with a meringue base and Chinese gooseberries (we call them Kiwi) and strawberries on top. It was fantastic! Excellent dinner too. Part of the dinner conversation included instruction to us on the levy and why the trees need to be removed and the dirt re-compacted so that the levy will hold if the river floods. We didn't realize that a road we often drive on is actually the top of the levy. To avoid the unshoveled sidewalks in our neighborhood we decided to drive to the mall and walk around the parking lot. At 8 am there were so many cars in the parking lot that we went into the mall to see what was happening. It was just old people walking for exercise! We were bundled up to walk outdoors and hadn't prepared ourselves to be seen, so after one lap inside the mall (took 15 minutes!) we went out and walked around the outside. Besides, we were much too young to join that bunch! We got permission to order some songbooks from our supplies budget so the students, who love to stay and sing around the piano, will have choices in addition to the hymn book.