Valentine's Day, District Activity, and a Celebrity Encounter: February 12 - 18, 2024

      We always start the week off with ukulele lessons on Monday night.  Right after ukulele lessons, in the same room in the HGB building, our ward has FHE activities.  This week was a Valentine's craft activity.  There was all kinds of colored paper, markers, and stickers to make as many Valentine cards you wanted.  They were encouraging everyone to make some to give to their ministering brothers and sisters, which in most cases were roommates.  Here's a part of the group busy at work on their Valentines.  The young man in the back by the cooler is the Bishop's son.

  Here's the other part of the group.  The young man on the end (I wish I could remember his name) had made a very cool heart card listing ways "I Love you because. . ."  Hopefully he was giving it to a very special lady in his life???  We made several heart shaped Valentines to put on our neighbor's downstairs door.  They are 3 young men away from home working construction at BYU-H, so we wanted to give them some love on Valentine's Day (picture coming up later in the blog).

      I came into work on Tuesday morning to see a Valentine treat left for me by Sister Jones.

   

   I passed out these small Valentine treats to everyone in the Food Warehouse on Tuesday at the prayer meeting we have every day.  Spreading the love all around.

      One of my former piano students, Abby, has been serving a mission in Rome Italy at the visitor's center.  I have been wanting to do a virtual tour with Sister Thurgood for quite a while.  We were hoping to arrange one for a District Activity, but with the 11-hour time difference and everyone in our district having different day's off because some of us are PCC missionaries and some are BYU-H missionaries, it just wasn't going to work out.  But Elder Rappleye and I decided we would just do one anyway.  We invited others to join us, but it didn't work for them either, so it was just us.  Tuesday night at 9pm our time and 8am Wednesday morning, Sister Thurgood's time, we finally got to do a tour.  She had to get special permission to do it at 8am because the Visitor's Center is not open until 9am.  Sister Thurgood (on the left) and her companion in the picture to the left with the temple in the background. 

  

  She showed us this amazing stained-glass mural and explained all the depictions of the different parables incorporated in the mural.  I loved it!

Of course, we saw the Christus and the 12 Apostle statues.  She explained the unique symbolism carved in each apostle's statue.

Here's a view looking out from the visitor's center towards the temple.  Having the virtual tour just made me wish to see it in person someday.  Maybe we can go with our son-in-law, Keith and daughter, Aimee someday.  Keith served his mission in Rome, Italy so I'm sure he would be willing to come with us.

 

    Our day off was on Valentine's Day.  We headed down to try to do the Likeke Falls hike that we didn't get to do because it was too muddy. As we got close to it, it began to pour down rain, so we knew it was going to be too muddy again.  Hopefully we will be able to hike it someday.  We headed back home but stopped at Kualoa Regional Park.  It is home to the icon view of Mokoli'i Island, commonly referred to as Chinaman's Hat.  The finish line of season 20 of the Amazing Race was filmed here in 2012.

    

We got out of our car just as a bus load of tourists unloaded and there were people everywhere.  The picture above was taken where all the tourists were.  Luckily, I could crop out most of the extra people.

Funny thing is none of them walked very far down the beach.  This picture was taken further down the beach where there was no one around.  it was overcast and cool here as well.  We had brought our swimsuits hoping to get in the water and spend some time soaking up the sun, but it wasn't meant to be.

We "heart attacked" our downstairs neighbors, putting the heart-shaped Valentines on their front door while they were at work.  I guess they liked it because they kept the hearts on their door for a week.  Next year we will "heart attack" our back upstairs neighbors.

   In the evening, Annalise, a young woman from our YSA ward invited us to go to the temple grounds to watch her open her mission call. Her mother contacted us, told us they were flying to Hawaii from Colorado to be there when she opened her mission call.  It was going to be a surprise.  Her mom wanted to know if we could pick up a cookie order at Foodland in Laie to take to the mission call opening ceremony because she knew the timing would be tight.

      Of course, we were more than happy to do that for her.  After we picked up the cookies, we headed over to the temple grounds.  We were a little bit early, so we explored the grounds and found this grove of banyan trees up behind the temple.  

      Annelise got called to serve in the Brazil Campinas mission and will learn Portuguese.  She will start her mission on June 3.

      

      To end our Valentine's Day activities, we walked down the hill from our pad to North Shore Tacos for dinner.  This was our second time eating here, and I'm still not a fan.  We have tried two different menu items and neither one was very impressive.  It's hard to compete with Cafe Rio and/or Costa Vida.

      Thursday morning when Elder Rappleye got to work at the motor pool, Elder and Sister Archibald were there with Elder Dahlin.  Sister Archibald was asking for a blessing because she had recovered from Shingles, so she thought, but it had come back worse than before.  They all went into the office, shut the door, and gave Sister Archibald a priesthood blessing.  Then Elder Archibald asked for a blessing as well.  The next day, Friday, Elder Rappleye received a text message from Elder Archibald stating that the Shingles were gone and thanking them for the blessings.

      We were asked to plan our monthly district activity for February.  We were a little nervous about doing that because we haven't been here long and didn't really know our district members very well and what they might like to do or have already done before.  I decided to get on the Just Serve website to see if there were any service opportunities we could do as a district.  I noticed the post for making ti leaf leis to be put on the graves of the fallen soldiers at the Punchbowl cemetery on Memorial Day.  Every Memorial Day all 38,000 graves of veterans have a ti leaf leis placed on their grave marker to honor and remember their sacrifice.  It sounded like a great service activity to do as a district.

 But it was an hour away at Wahiawa Botanical Garden.  I wasn't sure if everyone in the district would want to spend so much of their P-day doing this activity.  We decided to present it to the group and see if there was any interest.  To my surprise they all thought it sounded like a great idea.  So, I contacted John and arranged to have us come on Saturday morning and spend a couple of hours making leis.  Pictured above is John, explaining and demonstrating how to make the leis.

Here is our group ready to learn how to make the leis.  Everyone came except the Harrises.  Elder Harris has been having health issues and was still not well enough to come.

Elder Gammon chose to strip the tea leaves of the middle vein or stem part that is not used.  Everyone else got busy twisting and weaving the ti leaves together to make the leis.  It was not hard and as soon as we got the technique down it was smooth sailing.  Sister Gammon was the queen of making the leis.  She was very speedy and probably made twice as many leis as the rest of us.

Here are the finished products.  We made 53 ti leis while we were there.  They take the finished leis and store them in a freezer until Memorial Day.

After we were done, we all decided we might as well explore the botanical garden while we were there.

Look at those massive roots!

Headed down to the lower gardens with the Neeleys.

Here's our whole district minus the Harrises. L-R:  Elder and Sister Lee, Elder and Sister Neeley, Elder and Sister Rappleye, and Elder and Sister Gammon.

Then they all agreed to go to lunch.  We went to a cute small Mexican restaurant near the botanical gardens called Barrio Cafe.

The decor was so bright and fun.

As we were waiting for our food, in walked Steven Sharp Nelson of Piano Guys fame.  I snapped a selfie just to get a picture of him.  Sister Lee jumped up and went over and talked to him.  Finally, someone in our group yells over to him, "We are big fans" and he says back, "I'm a big fan of YOU guys." because of our missionary tags.  Then he comes over and starts talking to us telling us he has a son serving in Korea and what the next project the Piano Guys are working on.  I wish I had asked him if we could get a picture.  He was standing right next to me.  But the selfie is the best I got.

The district activity ended up being a great success.  All the couples talked about how much fun they had and what a great activity it was, and we even had an unplanned celebrity encounter.  Now I'm hoping they don't ask me to plan all the district activities.

On Sunday, we were invited to Brent and Jen Cowley's house for dinner.  His parents, Bob and Tammy Cowley were visiting from our home ward in South Jordan.  They live down the street from us and Tammy worked at Bingham High School with me.  Brent's little son, Cohen took this picture of the group.  We had a good long visit with them, so now they can report that we have been ministered to this month.

It was an unusually busy week.