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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....