Easter Dinner

HAPPY EASTER at the Noble's apartment.

We all got together for Easter Dinner. From front left around the table: LeVitres, Mahaffeys, Nobles, Allens, Galbraiths (Temple President & wife)

The Allens just arrived last night. They are from Gilbert Arizona and are here to replace the Florences who went home in February. They are the Records Preservation Missionaries. They go to the archives in downtown Montreal each day and digitally take pictures of all their documents. They send them into Salt Lake which makes a digital CD and sends a copy back to the National Archives. It's a great deal for them because they certainly do not have the time, money or manpower to make those records into a digital format so they are available to the public. Still, I just don't know if I could stand being in a 8x10 windowless room all day, just taking pictures of old documents. I admire them. AND - this is their second mission doing that! Amazing!  Pres. & Sister Galbraith are wonderful. They live in Provo and he teaches at BYU - but mostly he is known for his time in Jerusalem. He & his family lived there for 20 years. He got his PHD at the Hebrew University & he was in charge for finding the land, and getting the BYU Jerusalem Center built. Then he was the director for like 17 years. He has given us several firesides explaining about the Arab-Israeli conflict. They are here on a mission of sorts. They were called to the be Montreal Temple President & Matron for 3 years. They will go home in October of this year. It helps us to get together for these holidays. I guess it makes us not miss our families quite so much!



Cabana de Sucre

Today many of the Senior Couples went together to see a Cabana de Sucre - a maple sugar camp.

We got there in time for the HUGE all-things maple luncheon! It's held in a large dining room:

Here's our group - From front left & around table: Sr.Cheney, E.&S.Noble - (Sr.Noble taking the picture), Emmy, Sister Cannon & Pres. Cannon (their daughter came to visit), across the table- E&Sr.
Levitre, Sr.&E. Mahaffey, & E. Cheney.

And, of course, we had to enjoy everything you could imagine made with Maple. - Maple cured ham & bacon, beans w/maple syrup, egg casserole with maple sugar- potatoes, soup, bread & everything done with maple sugar, spice, or seasoning!

Even their special treat - spun maple sugar on a stick:

Then it was on to our wagon ride through the maple syrup forest.

Of course it was so cold we had to bundle up!

Beautiful Percheron horses pulled us on our wagon ride:

We had a great time just being together... we even saw a 400-year old tree... still giving syrup!

It was just a great day to all be together!

We work in TWO places !

When we came to Montreal to train for working  in the office - we had to stay in a new apartment.

We are expecting a new Senior Couple about April 6 - so they just rented their apartment a couple of weeks early and we are staying there until they arrive. Only 1 problem - They bought all the new furniture for this apartment at IKEA - so, we work at the office by day- and then come home and put together IKEA furniture at night. We're exhausted!

We put together 2 nightstands, a tall chest of drawers, and a desk for the bedroom.

And a couch, 2 chairs, a bookshelf, and a long low chest of drawers in the living room.

In the kitchen we miraculously didn't have to pt together ANYTHING!!

On the first few days it was so hot putting all this together that we were running the fans on HIGH!

(they don't turn on the air-conditioning in our building until June 1 !Sheesh)  But by the time we finished several days later- it turned cold and actually SNOWED!!! Crazy Montreal Weather!

Roger has decided he can probably get a job at IKEA when we go home because we have put together a TON of their furniture!

Our MOVE to Montreal

Our wonderful mission office couple, Elder & Sister Giles are going home. Salt Lake has not replaced them with a new couple yet, so the President asked us if we would move to Montreal, temporarily, and train with the Giles for 2 weeks before they leave, then stay on running the mission office until the new couple arrives and train them. We are supposing that the new couple will come around June 1 - so we will probably make it back to Cornwall around the middle of June?  This is the building where we work:

It was originally an old police station. The church bought it and renovated it to be a church on the bottom 2 floors and the mission offices, CES offices, and conference rooms on the 3rd floor.

It used to house the Spanish wards, but now is the home to the 2 Young Single Adult branches - one in French and one in English.

You come into the mission offices up to the mission secretary's desk. This is Sister Giles and where I will be training for the next 2 weeks. She answers the phones, does all the letters: welcome letters to incoming missionaries, leadership letters to Missionaries and their parents every 6 weeks when there are transfers and new District, Zone, AP leaders and trainers, & departing missionary letters to parents, stake presidents, bishops, and missionaries.She arranges for all travel incoming and outgoing, keeps extensive files of each missionary including all of their personal info, contact information, passports, & visas, as well as making copies of all these files for the mission president & wife which they keep at the mission home. She also makes and sends out a weekly emailed newsletter with information, pictures, and mission statistics, as well as a Quarterly newsletter in hardcopy for each missionary. She separates and distributes the incoming mail & packages, applies for VISA extensions, handles the referrals that come in from Salt Lake, and keeps a miriad of photo albums, and lists for the mission president and his wife. She is one busy lady.  In the background is Sister Levitre, who is in charge of all the ordering of supplies, books, DVD's, nametags, and cell phones for all the missionaries. ( Behind her was where our Internet missionaries used to work for Mormon.org live chat, but now that is not being used.)

Believe me, I have gained a whole new appreciation for the INCREDIBLE amount of work it takes to run a mission!

Elder Mahaffey trains with Elder Giles in his own office. (we can see & talk to him through the open window from time to time) He will be in charge of all of the finances- both for the mission, the Mission President & wife, and for individual missionaries AND is also in charge of all the apartments. (Elder Levitre - not pictured- is in charge of all the mission vehicles, the arriving, using, repairing, licensing, insurance claims, and selling.)

As we are right across the street from a metro station, the Sisters decided to draw the Plan of Salvation in chalk on the sidewalk and stairs into the building and try to contact people as they walked by!

Because we are right in the middle of downtown Montreal, and across from the Metro station, we see a lot of missionaries in the office. They also come to pick up their zone orders and mail. It is such a great experience to be able to interact with so many wonderful missionaries. They are GREAT young people.

I think we're going to like it here!

Day 6 - Last day with Misty

Today Misty had to fly out, so we just went up to Montreal a little early and did some last minute
sight-seeing. We went to Old Town Montreal and saw Notre Dame Cathedral:

Then we stopped by the Maison Saint-Gabriel. (St.Gabriel's house). The plaque outside explains that it was originally used as the welcoming place and first school for the "daughters of the king."

These were girls that were wards of the state in France. Since there were mostly only men settling in France's new frontier of Quebec, the king devised a plan to send these women to Quebec and teach them to be wives and mothers. They learned to read and write and make suitable mates for all the single men in Quebec and thus continue to insure the growth of the French empire abroad.

It was really like stepping back into time.  They showed us how life really was back in the early 1800's. How they cooked, washed, built fires, cleaned, wove material for clothing, etc.

It was a pretty stark life, but it was apparently much better than the life they would have had as an orphan growing up in France, so many young women took the opportunity to come. We finished up with lunch at a little hole in the wall pizza place, but which has VERY good pizza, and then headed for the airport.  It was so much fun to have Misty here. She headed off to Paris from here to join Shelly, her roommate, for a vacation in Paris. (nice work if you can get it...)
Thank you Misty for letting us enjoy being tour guides and enjoying your company for your brief visit! We love you!

Day 5 with Misty

We got up early this morning to take Misty to a Sugar Camp... (in French- Cabana de Sucre). It is a Maple Syrup farm. We had their "All things Maple" breakfast.

We took our Relief Society President Sheila Merpaw and her husband Konny with us! They have become our very good friends here. Her husband is not a member.

                                           

This place is surrounded by a working Maple Syrup Farm. They showed us how they USED to have to collect the maple syrup out of the trees. They used to tap the trees and hang a bucket with a lid over the tap:



There were still some syrup running, so Misty tried to get some:

The sap is clear when it comes out of the tree. Then they would collect it and boil it down in a huge iron pot - which turns it an amber color. They usually did their boiling outside.

And you can see why maple syrup is often so expensive... It takes 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of maple syrup!

But today they tap the tree and hook a plastic tube to it.  The tubes are hooked to a suction-type machine which literally sucks all the sap from the tree.

Each time you tap the tree, then remove the tap, the tree seals the spot over so you cannot ever tap there again. You can see all the dark spots where this tree has been tapped.

There are ACRES of these plastic tubing lines running from tree to tree. Because this was a mild winter, it has made for a very short season for the sap running. (I'm guessing that will mean higher prices for maple syrup this year!

This was a cool picture we snapped that morning... it sort of reminded us of the sacred grove pictures you often see with the cool morning mists...

Later that evening we went to the Relief Society Birthday Dinner.  One part of the program was that they had everyone's baby picture up on the board and you had to guess who went with which baby picture. I had wanted to be part of it, but I had not brought ANY baby pictures. I checked with each of our children and no one had any baby pictures of me either. Finally, I thought to contact my brother to see if he had any of us growing up. Luckily he DID!!  I had to laugh at his email, however. He said, "I did find one of you growing up, but frankly, it was a little racy for a missionary picture."   He had found an old picture of me in the summer when..for some TOTALLY INEXPLICABLE reason, my mother had let me run around with no shirt on when I was about 5 or 6.  Luckily, He is a master at Photoshop... so this is the one I used:

I'm not sure where my mom learned to cut bangs... but she LOVED cutting them short. No one guessed my picture except Misty! ha!



Day 3 & 4 with Misty

Day 3 was Sunday. Unfortunately for Misty she had to attend our Cornwall ward and listen to US as the speakers in Sacrament meeting.   Guess a vacation can't be ALL fun and games! ha! Then she went with us to go teach a lesson to a sister who is less active.  This sister has trouble reading, so we showed her the Restoration video and gave her a Children's version of Book of Mormon scripture stories. Misty even helped out by bearing her testimony and it was WONDERFUL!!!
Day 4 we headed for the nation's capital... no not Washington DC... the capital of Canada - OTTAWA.

We went to the Pariament Building. In the summer they have the changing of the Guard here - complete with their red jackets and tall black furry hats.... but that only happens June-August, so not during Misty's visit...Rats!

And, because it was Spring Break in Ottawa, there were so many kids that came that they were out of tour tickets early - so we didn't even get to go inside! So, we decided to just walk around it. There was a nice park-like walkway where every few steps was a statue of a former prime-minister. Then we made a wonderful discovery:

We saw the beautiful law library from the outside. The architecture was wonderful. It made us wonder how gorgeous it might have been on the INSIDE!!

Even the windows were gorgeous... Then on we went on our walking tour of Ottawa. We were headed to get Misty a beaver tail.  On our walk, we were reminded of a favorite place of ours in Antioch:  (Roger always LOVES to have his picture taken... )

and, Misty made a new friend:

At last we arrived at the place to have a beaver tail.  It's an Ottawa tradition.

It's like a piece of fried bread.. a scone... topped with your choice of toppings. Here Misty has chosen a SKOR bar beaver tail.  Yummy!  Mine was maple with chocolate:

We had driven to Ottawa by the scenic route to show Misty all the farmland, and so it had taken us a little over an hour... then all the walking in Ottawa, then another hour home.. so we didn't get to do a whole lot that day, but it was fun.