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Yesterday was Easter so we had our usual church services but afterwards we had a nice Easter dinner for all of the missionaries at the Arrival Center.

The dinner last night had ham, funeral potatoes, a salad,  and a desert.  We had several family guest and a room full of missionaries.

President and Sister McArthur spoke to us after the meal to top off the evening.

Today was the "Annual Prairie Grass Burn" put on by Facilities Maintenance and the Nauvoo Fire Department.  They have free hot dogs, potato chips, and kettle korn for everyone that attend the event for the hour that precedes the burning.

This is, believe it or not, a pretty big event for the community and a lot of local people attend it as well as most of the missionaries.

One of those attending the event called this a "Tulip Tree".  Not so sure about that but it is kind of pretty.  It's located just across the street from the burn.

This is what the field looked like before the burn started.  Note the fire trucks located behind.  They had about 3 times as many trucks/firefighters there as last year.  There were a lot more/taller weeds this year so I guess they were expecting a larger fire.

3 minutes after the start of the fire, this is what is left of the field.  I took a video of the burn and it actually took about 3 minutes before it ran out of fuel.  That's 5 acres of weeds gone in about 3 minutes.  That is pretty impressive!  There were several bunny rabbits that ran out from the fire towards the people and were really spooked with all of the people standing around.  They were pretty confused as to where to go. 

The video of the burn I took is over 200 MB and I can't post it as it's just too big to transfer to the blog.  I'll make it available somewhere along the line.

Only a couple more weeks to spring shutdown and we start prep for the wako summer schedule.  Can't wait!  And in less than a month the summer missionaries will be here.  So much changing in the next few weeks...

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We have been in Nauvoo, on our mission, for one year now, officially!  That seems so hard to believe.  We are making plans for the end of our mission, preparing for this summer's hectic pageant schedule and all of the new summer missionaries that will be arriving in a little over a month (30 of them) from late April until November.  So many things left to do these next few months.

New leadership in the Engineers here at the temple will necessitate changes in the way we do things around here.  Not sure how that will affect my schedule but it will probably be changes for me, somehow.  Should know about that in the next week or so.  Change is always somewhat difficult.  Most likely we will loose the once a week online day and go back to all engineer, all the time, as we were before the winter schedule.  Not sure if the new head engineer plans to change things yet.  Too many things going on in his new world to ask those kinds of questions, yet.  He has an audit from Salt Lake this Thursday and he is expecting that to be pretty difficult, at best.  Then after mid-April, we start a two week shutdown and another annual inspection so things will get even worse.  The temple opens back up the first of May with the new Spring schedule and preparations for the pageant schedule to start in July.  Lots of things start popping in May and this place starts to warm up/get crazy in a lot of different ways.  Summer is not too far off.  But, we are "veterans" of last summer and there are only a few of us from last summer.  The low numbers of people at the temple attending sessions will be a thing of the past until probably December or January.  We will be gone by then.

We had a brand new couple of "winter" missionaries show up on Saturday, the Thompsons.  They will be here for a year.  I think they are the last of the 12 month missionaries for this winter.  There may be another set, not sure.  It seems odd that they will be here after we are gone.  Most everyone, until now, will be leaving about the time we're done.  Now they are staying after we're gone.  Now that is just weird!  We will be leaving about the time all of the summer missionaries are leaving, early November.  It will be quite an exit then.  But, it will be our time to head out.  And, I'm thinking, none too soon.  Gotta get Kevin on to his next big adventure and the next part of his life....

Till next time...

Just some of the pretty stuff beginning to come up everywhere around the temple.  Well, if the deer don't eat it...

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It looks like spring is here in old Nauvoo, finally.

Volunteer Daffodils in our backyard...

...grass across the street...

...some of the early Tulips are beginning to show their sunshine at the Temple...

..Hyacinths are popping up here and there...

...ooooo, pretty!

The Tulip beds in front of the temple are all in full growth and should be popping up pretty early this year.  They ought to be pretty magnificent, and early!  Last year we got here about this time (yes, we got here almost one year ago) and they were nowhere near this far along.  So, I may be taking a lot of pictures of lovely Tulips when they start blooming in their short, 3 week season.

For the last couple of days, I've been working inside the cooling tower for chiller #1.  It had some rust on the galvanized upper section, the bottom is stainless steel.  I had to use a powered wire brush to get all of the rust off then clean it and add a coating of epoxy paint.  While that is not all that much fun, getting into the cooling tower, through the little opening, has been a bit of an exercise similar to "tank diving" back in my submarine days.  Also, it makes my chiropractor happy as I hafta visit him afterwards to straighten out my spine from the contortions I need to get into to get inside the tower. But, at least one is sort of done for now.  I still need one more trip inside for last minute clean up then I put it back into service, that'll be tomorrow.  Next, I need to plan out a time to work on tower #2 when it's not raining or hailing for a couple of days.

The actuators for #2 tower valves seem to be fairly stable and seem to be working now, at least for the time being.  Let's hope the boards don't go bad like the last ones did.  But, I am getting better at changing them.  I'll be glad when I can finally wrap up that onerous project.  I still have some settings to adjust on all four actuators and am waiting on the right software/hardware to do that.  Hard to believe that it takes an $850 device to talk to the actuator.

As of Saturday, the old Head Engineer left and we have a new Head Engineer, Rick Jensen.  He's been here for several years and has earned the right to lead the Engineering group here at the temple.  They promoted Blake Duncan, the Asst Engineer to Senior Engineer, taking Rick's place.  They have, apparently, but have not announced, that they have replaced the Asst Engineer but we don't know who it is.  He will most likely be working nights along with me.  Hope I can get along with him for the 7 months I have left here.  With shutdown and pageant just around the corner, that's going to be kind of essential.  Rick and I got along fine.  Change is always hard but I will not be here for the long haul as I am "just a missionary" as everyone reminds me frequently.  Good thing, too!

In about another month we need to start thinking about what we are going to be doing after this mission and start making plans for that.  It takes a fair amount of time to get prepared for the next mission so we need to start moving in that direction.

We have started filling out the paperwork for Kevin's application at BYU-Idaho.  There are a lot of things that need to happen between now and January, including him taking the SAT/ACT, which he didn't in high school.  Just a little oversight.  That is going to be a bit of a problem but one that can be dealt with.  Just not easily.  Whether he goes in January or a year later still remains to be seen.  Working on the details.

Have a Happy Easter and hope you enjoy conference in a couple of weeks.

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Gee, it was exactly one year ago today (leap year and a year later) that we headed out for Nauvoo and started out on our experience of a lifetime.  Seems like it was a million years ago!  Well, it was, sort of...

We had a special missionary Family Home Evening on the 29th at the stake center that involved a few activities:

Gathering all together and getting ready for the night's festivities.

We spent the first part of the night going over some pretty obscure Leap Year facts and oddities in a question and answer marathon.  Our table didn't do all that well but we weren't the worst, either.

Next we had a portion of training on how to say names in Spanish, French, Polish, and some other languages.  Arlene was sucked into doing Dutch:

She can pronounce the stuff but I sure can't.  She did a fine job.  Everyone thinks that because I'm married to her that I can speak the names the same way she does.  Not so, I remind them....

The last part of the evening was spent watching a presentation on the birds in the area by Elder Russel and he did a great job.  Only problem was that I didn't take any pictures of his presentation.  Sorry about that!  We were over at their house last night and he is taking pictures with a special camera of the local fauna that has been cleaning out his bird feeder at night.  Interesting shots of rabbits, racoons and deer.

So, Nauvoo is just beginning to wake up from it's winter nap.  It was not a very bad winter, just a bit dreary.  The weather for the next week or so is supposed to be in the upper 60s all this week and next (today we hit the low 70s on our way to Keokuk, IA for supplies for P-Day).  The river is no longer frozen and we saw a couple of barges plying their trade up and down the Mississippi this morning.  First of the season!  That wasn't supposed to happen for another week.  I guess it's early this year.  The river is free of ice.  Looks like spring is here and the Robins are coming back as well as many of the ducks.

The Pageant area looks pretty dismal and brown still but the grass is starting to come up out of the dead leftovers.  In a week or so it should start looking like lawn again.  

The "Sacred Grove" is pretty dead looking also.

...and the temple is surrounded by dead grass and winter looking area all in front of it.  But, in only a very short time, if we can get any rain here, this will start to green up pretty nicely.

So, for a history lesson, this is the house that belonged to William Weeks, the temple architect.  Designed and oversaw the building of the original Nauvoo temple.  It is within a block of the temple so he could easily see and work on the temple for all the time it was under construction.  They've been working on fixing up the interior of the house.  Most of the time a lucky couple gets to stay here from the site missionaries.

It will only be a few weeks until we shut down the temple (April 18) and get ready to receive the summer missionaries (April till November).  We have 30 couples coming this year instead of the 40 we had last year.  We are all hoping that it will be enough.  By the end of October, early November, all of the summer missionaries will be gone, all of the Engineer missionaries will have been replaced, and we will have a couple of new paid engineers working in the temple.  Lots of changes coming here of recent.  Our head Engineer is leaving this week to take a position at the Boise, Idaho temple as the head Engineer there.  That means that we will have some movement amongst the engineer group here.  Should be interesting.  

I've been working on a project to replace four  8" butterfly actuator motors for the cooling towers since the old ones failed some time ago.  If they don't work, we have no chillers to cool the temple and the project was pretty involved.  I finally got them in a couple of weeks ago and had two of the electronic boards fail on them a few days after they started operation.  Killed both chillers.  Now, I'm waiting on replacement parts.  Jeepers, not something I wanted to see happen on this project.  The actuators are nearly $2000 a pop.  I'd kinda like to see them work for a couple of weeks before they fail.  The tech I talked to said they have been experiencing issues with the boards failing prematurely. Well, that would have been nice to know before we bought the actuators...they have a 2 year warrantee...oh, thanks....

We have been granted our request to stick around for 30 days plus enough time to pick up Elder Kevin from his mission so we won't be home until about mid-November or thereabouts.  We're trying to figure out how we can get him into school as soon as he gets off his mission but there are some kinks in that plan.  We will be working on that over the next few months.  Such is life, I guess.

Not much going on here, yet.  The Fudge Factory has opened back up and GrandPa's restaurant will open up this week so we will have a place to eat here other than the gas station pizza or driving to Keokuk/Quincy for a meal.  I guess spring/summer is slowly advancing.  I get to run in the mornings and not wear thermal underwear, two/three layers on top, and two sets of headgear to keep from freezing to death.  In fact, I have run in running shorts once, so far, this year.  But, only once....it'll be hot and ugly before we know it....it was 70 today.  Not too awful bad.  Daylight savings is next weekend.  I guess it's that time of year.  See ya soon....