Note: Our mission will be wrapping up soon. We arrive back in Salt Lake at the end of March.
P-Day Fun
Monday is preparation day (P-Day) for missionaries here. A day to wash clothes, clean apartment, shopping and get ready for the week. Senior Missionaries can be flexible and so we made Tuesday our P-day and visited 100 Islands with the Whitings, Pughs and Spungs.
It was a long drive of 166 Km (106 miles) 4.5 hours each way so we could only spend a few hours at the islands. We rented a longboat with Captain (father) and Mate (son.) It was fascinating boating through the channels of undercut shoreline. You can rent a small Island for your family vacation and include one small building and several open air huts. There is no concessions on the islands so if you vacation you either take your own or order food delivered from the main land each day. We all took coolers with snacks and water. They still charged us $2 per table to sit down. Two of the islands had ziplines across the water to and smaller island. The price was good at $2 per ride.
BYU Philippines?
As we were returning from 100 islands, LouAnn jammed on the brakes as we passed a building painted blue with a BYU logo on it. What is going on. So after exploring a couple of alleys she found her way into the Garb Athletics manufacturing plant where dozens on people sewing clothing with the BYU logo. One of the owners is from Provo and hence the visual presence of BYU in the philippines.
Family History
We launched family history training in the Palayan Branch on Saturday. So that everyone could have hands on experience, we rented Clickers Internet Cafe. 13 members participated and for most of them, their first time on familysearch.org. The Mejia's from Tarlac came and helped everyone. We're holding a similar event at the Kalikid Branch on Saturday the 18th.
Apartment Inspections
We have started another round of apartment inspections. Seems like 50% of the apartments need some repair or another. All part of the fun in the Mission.
Super Bowl
As you know, we jump through hoops trying to connect to BYU football and other US sporting events. It's a combination of slow, unstable internet and the idiosyncrasies of the different channels and international copyrights. So today was the Superbowl! It started at 7:30 am Monday in PHT. Last night something weird started happening on the laptop with dish anywhere and Malwarebytes not liking something that Dish Anywhere was feeding.
Sister Dansie had her heart set on watching on our huge 24" monitor plugged into the laptop. So 7:30 am Elder Dansie tried to fire up Fox Go sports using VPN to Seattle to get US access. Fox Go sports was maxed out. So switch to dish anywhere iPad. But the old iPad 2s we have don't work very well upstairs. So while Sister Dansie was watching the end of the 1st quarter, we moved downstairs next to the modem/router and fired up her iPhone5 with an HDMI adapter to the 24" monitor. All was great until 5 minutes into halftime when the internet died. A quick call to Sister Alene and asked her to record the game while we reconnected to Alene's Dish Anywhere via the DVR so we could access the entire game, even with hiccups. So in the end, Sister Dansie was able to watch the entire game and overtime although 5+ minutes delay.