Time Flies Part 1

Every day something new to post. So here is my catch up blog.

Thursday

First full day on the job.  And was it a full day!  We have prayer meeting every morning at 7 AM.  And we do eventually have a spiritual thought and a prayer, but not until a whole lot of joking around.  The FM missionaries are a very happy, jovial lot. It's a great way to start the morning. 

Our crew is in charge of watering all of the greenhouse plants first thing.  After we did that we got in this big truck that hauls a dump trailer.  I'm told that I will learn to drive this monster.  Driving it will not be a problem.  Not knocking down things will be.  But for now Sister Dare likes to drive it and we all seem fine with that. I know I am.

Just to give you a sense of the variety of things we did on Thursday: First we emptied pots of flowers at the Chamber of Commerce. Then we raked up what our "boss" called "a million walnuts". I think maybe that was under estimated.  Then we cleaned up branches from a wind storm that came through during the night.  Finally we cleaned up after a tree cutting crew had cut down a couple of trees.  To finish out the day we went back to the green house and made some coleus cuttings. This day gave me a good work out.  I'm told I'll get use to this sort of work out.

While driving around looking for fallen branches, we saw some students running an interesting machine.  We pulled over and went to investigate.  The machine is a ground penetrating radar. Two corner stones of a building were exposed, so they knew there was a foundation there.  This radar tells if there is some structure buried.  The professor told us it was the store of Ezra Oakley. Joseph Smith originally divided the city into 4 acre blocks, with 4 one acre parcels in each block.  This gave the Saints enough land for a house, animals, fruit trees, and a garden.  But so many immigrated to Nauvoo that the parcels were subdivided. The area these students were working had become a business district. The professor said there were many foundations buried in these blocks. They told us to come back in the afternoon if we wanted to see what they dug up. I would really have liked to have done that, but unfortunately I was so tired when I got home, about 1:30, that after lunch I fell sound asleep.

Empty pots

Planted pots

Before

After

Ground penetrating radar

Dump