040117

Sorry for the delay.  Conference weekend our wireless internet went down and it just came back up this past Friday (7th).  Uploading picts, etc. using my cell data plan was ill advised so I had to wait a bit.  We finally went down to TDS and talked to them about getting real internet into our apartment.  The tech showed up Saturday and installed something we can work with.  Since there is fiber to the apartment complex, it's actually pretty good.  I am routinely getting between 20 and near 50 MB on a test.  Working out the kinks gets up to around 30 to 40 consistently so pretty happy with that.  If I was getting anywhere around 20 I would have been pretty happy.  Uploads are around 5 so I can live with that.  Except for this blog, I don't upload a lot.  Except for the few pictures, this isn't a lot either.  So, now I'm getting things up and running again...fer now.

A bit of back tracking to April 1st...

Here is the apartment where we live.

There are three wings of Temple Apartments, as they are known in the area.  6 separate buildings.  We're in apartment 41.  This is looking West towards Kalifornia.  On top of the bluff there is the old, abandoned, airport.

Looking East is the rest of our building and the Maternity Ward across the street. Yes, every once in a while we get to hear sirens announcing their approach.  It is a 5 story hospital and it's fairly busy.  I found out today it has a psych ward on the 3rd floor.  That should be fairly interesting.

 

Walking out to the street corner, to the Eat, and looking slightly North West is the Temple Visitor's Center and, of course, the St. George Temple.  We are encouraged to do cleaning in the Visitor's Center once a week at 9 PM to help defray the cost of our apartment in the Temple Apartments so we try to go on either Wednesday or Thursday nights.  Usually doesn't take too awfully long, 30 to 45 minutes, sometimes an hour depending on how many show up that night.

 

Looking down the block on the corner shows the hills to the South.

 

Up the block shows the red hills to the North, Visitor's Center and the Stake Center on the right.

 

On the West end of the temple grounds, looking up the street there are those red dirt hills, looking North.  Most of St. George is ringed with these very red hills.  Very reminiscent of Placerville red dirt in color only somewhat "redder", I think.  I can't get a good enough shot to really bring out how red these hills really are but they are very red. Note the huge amount of traffic.  Don't let this fool you, the other end of St. George (East of here), where a lot of the stores are located, has been crammed with vehicles and cars.  Worse than downtown San Francisco at rush hour.  But, mostly, this is a sleepy little berg.

 

Facing West again, note the D on the bluff.   It's lit up at night and is for Dixie College, a few blocks from us here.  A four year college here in the South of the state.  

 

We've settled into our apartment, gotten our iMac and my laptop set up so we can do oodles of family history work done after hours 'cause 8 hours a day just isn't enough.  It's about 500 square feet and, obviously not intended for techies to live in.  But, the rent is fine and we now have internet so we're happy.  We can even stream stuff and it doesn't halt every 2 seconds till it buffers up for the next couple of seconds of run time.  Verizon works OK here.  Better than Camino, for sure.

 

Here is where we work all day, every day.  We have quite a crew of fellow missionaries.  About 5 couples full time and around 85 Church Service Missionaries work here on different shifts all day long, 5 days a week.  Everyone is in a different state of training and expertise.  

For the first couple of weeks we did indexing full time.  Arlene already knew how to do it but I had to be trained on that.  I was always doing other things so had to learn the ropes.  Trust me, after a week of doing indexing full time, you sort of know how to do it.  We're also working on IDX indexing which is where indexing will be heading sometime mid-2017.  It's a little simpler to do than the current way.

Arlene has been asked to handle the PPA's or Post Production Audits.  When a film is digitized it has to be looked at then sent back to Salt Lake to be filed in the archives and sent on for distribution.  We are the first ones to look at recently digitized films and see if they are good enough to go out into general distribution.  Once they pass our scrutiny, they are good to go.  Arlene gets to send around a hundred films (digital format) to each of her "assignees", like me, to look over the films, find out what is wrong or right, then say what the condition of the film is and either pass it or fail it.  The ROC gets hundreds of these on Tuesday and they need to go back on Thursday.  So, we're all busy as can be those two days getting things looked at.

I've been tasked with the "Pretty Board".  I take pictures of the new missionaries, have them fill out a questionnaire, put the picts and questionnaire together, add scrap booking stuff to it and hang them on this huge board in the hallway.  Since we have a long hallway and lots of missionaries plus the fact it was a couple of months behind and the Sister Missionary that is leaving next week (getting married, mission ends) needed to be replaced, I kind of had to pick things up pretty fast. 'Course, they had about nothing for men in the scrap booking box...all fluff and frilly stuff.  I'll be fixing that here pretty soon.  But I did manage to get nearly a dozen made up and hung on the wall in a few days.  Now to keep it up.

Also, I'm trying to figure out why the A/C doesn't work all that well.  So, I'm in charge of that.  Heck, they have 4 systems in the building so that was a major job just trying to figure out how to deal with that to begin with!  And, I've been doing computer geek stuff, slowly but surely.  I've got the password for the admin account and have done a couple of them.  But, Windows 10, don't ya know.  Certainly not Macs...shudder.

More to follow...