1st Haircut Week

Yes it was the week of our first haircuts. There was a Sports Clips right down from where Sister McGuire was getting her hair done. Best thing about it: there was a Chick-fil-A right down the street! So now we look just fabulous.
One of the real blessings of being Senior Missionaries is the opportunity to become acquainted with the young missionaries. We each have a list of missionary apartments that we have to inspect every six weeks. As we go to perform that inspection we can visit with them a little and make suggestions on how to keep their place a little more clean.  (Of course all of them are spotless, after all they 18-21 years old). Naturally their attitudes and mind sets are somewhat different, but all of them are trying hard to do what they have been called to do.
We are lucky to have the Assistants to the President in one of our wards and Zone Leaders in the other. These young men are some of the best in the mission and have fun to get to know better. We get to feed them every other week and this is a highlight of each week. One of the Assistants, Elder McChesney pictured below, is on his way home to Highland, Utah as I write this. As many seem to realize as they are out here a while, he could have worked a little harder in High School and regrets it now. He hopes we'll see him in either a BYU football uniform or possibly a Weber State one in the next year or so.

We are trying to get in some of the sights here in San Diego, so we took off for the San Diego Zoo on a day they were painting the Institute.  It has really changed from years ago when we went there (either that or my memory is as poor as I think it is).  It was a beautiful day and we got around to maybe a third of the zoo.  

Sister McGuire fending off the vicious predator at the Zoo.

It is a really beautiful place - this is the fern walk.

It is nice to be able to take the time to see some of the beauties of the area.  Since we expect many children and grandchildren to come down, it certainly won't be the last time.

We sat down with the Institute Director, Brother Mackay, to plan for the coming semester at the Institute.  We will be planning to teach the Pearl of Great Price on Tuesday nights and supporting him in any teaching that he does during the week.  He will try to teach all of the other classes, but we will wait and see how many students sign up for the classes.  We have been working on finalizing the LDSSA organization, but still have some work to do.  We hope to get it done as soon as possible after school begins. It is an involved process but we should be able to finish it soon. In the meantime, we have been talking to everyone we can about signing up for Institute.  One of the difficulties is finding what members are currently enrolled in SDSU.  Some come to hide, some come and are clueless as to the Institute being here and some are actually excited about the Institute.  We hope our efforts will help make the Institute a destination for most LDS students.  

Our Sundays are really busy.  We began last Sunday at 9 with Diana playing for Elder McCloy to sing in church.  We then went to both wards and ended up with a baptismal service for Lei Ma.  Sister McGuire will post a picture of Lei.  Both wards were well attended as was the baptism.  By 6 pm we finally rolled into the apartment.  We considered going to the President's Fireside (they are wonderful), but after sitting down we couldn't bring ourselves to get up for two more hours, so we missed out.  

We had a fun opportunity to have dinner with four other Senior Couples: the Tanners, Richardsons, Barlows, and Monks.  It was a fun night, but we were envious of Tanners' apartment.  Compared to ours, it was really nice.  They had started out in our apartment, but the freeway noise was unbearable for Elder Tanner and he couldn't sleep.  Should I make a similar claim?  Actually it is isn't so bad with the fan going and we have been able to sleep just fine.