wed. 4/10/24 Hello Brandon, When I see people I like out walking I often ask if I can walk with them. Last week I invited myself on Allen Hilton’s walk. We/I talked about 1-Elizee -French popstar (he served a mission in France and used to do some French indexing) 2-Tattoos 3-Dogs vs. cats (we both agreed dogs are wonderful) 4-Ruth and his granddaughter in Germany and on and on. I told him my funny joke about whites getting their money’s worth from tattoos like blacks can't even hardly contrast. Blacks should start getting white tattoos and then they would show better. ha. @ he is having a hard time finding his words. He said he gets left and right mixed up. (he had to guide me for his pattern/trail) @ His wife accompanied the sacrament meeting on Easter and he sat up in the choir seats by her. He had his prostate removed about 5 years ago and was the most open anyone has ever been with me about how awful it was and the secondary effect. . . no more erection. @ Last year I texted him about his health since he seems to participate much less. I asked again and he texted: I prefer not to answer. @ That was a surprise. Perhaps because of walking and talking together for 10 minutes the barriers came down and he admitted having some brain scans done at the UoU and there is a separation between the frontal lobe and the brain membrane. He says he is experiencing a “long slow death.” I groaned and hurt for him. Mourn with those who mourn. But then I took the next unfeeling step! “Well, your brain served you well for many years!” A-”It really did. It remembered a lot of things.” @ Oops. See how natural that is! I have a hard time living with unresolved pain/issues. @@ In the stories from Ezio that I read yesterday he said, sometimes we don’t need to fill the void. When the spirit/HG is teaching it is often quiet. @ 4/12/24 Podcaster Jared Halverson does the longest podcasts of anyone! 4 and 5 and 6 and once even 7 hours for a CFM lesson! All this dunging & digging and planting and transplanting and pruning & grafting and nourishing this olive grove was so beautiful that Jacob had to copy it word perfect from Zenos! Man does the Lord of the Olive grove shake things up. Over and over to get good fruit from his trees! I have hated how RMN’s presidency has kept shaking things up! But. . . perhaps he has the spirit of Jacob 5 and tries to break the cultural christianity of the church so we can become covenant christianity. @When the branches were overgrowing the roots in the Philippines (No generational experience and strength) DHO was sent:Also, from 2002-2004, he and his wife, Sister Kristen M. Oaks, lived there as he presided over the Philippines Area of the Church. Area President. @ Same thing happened with JRH in Chile! -Holland lived in Santiago and served as president of the church's Chile Area from 2002 to 2004-
This was to give them strength, experience, cultural depth to draw from. Love it!
4/14 Sunday Hello Brandon, I often do meeting reports on the Sabbath. One of my BoM class teachers, Lisa, did this one today: My report on church today: They started off with an announcement that since the construction crew that tore all our wallpaper down and are painting the building didn't complete their work this week, we're only having sacrament meeting.
After the sacrament, Brother Gardner (2nd counselor) bore a brief and to-the-point testimony. Then the bishop did the same. Then the 1st counselor. Then 13 other people. We only had 1 "rambler". There was no line on the stand but there were no breaks in between either. Just one after another of beautiful, touching, to-the-point testimonies. Best fast and testimony meeting ever .
Brandon, they took out one of the front doors up by the stand in my chapel. It is the one I usually used to go in and out so it is a big adjustment for me. @ We went without sacrament in our wards for two weeks. RCU temple dedication and GC. Man did I miss my ward! @ A member of the 6th ward’s bishopric is in a wheel chair. He was bringing the bread in as I left the chapel to go to EQ. I bragged that I had removed all the chairs and stands and flower pots that were left in his way on the ramp as I met him coming in. I have seen the 3 pots of dying flowers there before. Today I showed them to my bishop as he shook my hand and he said, “I will take those out later today. The funeral people should have taken them out.” That was the impetus I needed. Now I know why they were there and what to do with them. Robert Linares used to work in the library with me 10+ years ago. He and Isabell have accepted callings to be greeters and they are fulfilling that calling. He did not come to EQ but he shook my hand before sacrament meeting. I have sat in front of them and entertained them with stories about Roger Eves on his world cruise before so we are friends. Today I asked if he would help me take out the dying flowers. I told him I hated to trash such attractive woven containers. He agreed with me! So we emptied them and left them by the back door and parking lot with a FREE sign. This makes me smile. Step by step, not knowing beforehand the things which I should do. Of course I held up the pot so the bishop could see that he did not remember to do it later! ha @@ I felt shy about asking for a ride to Hurricane for Sandra hosting our monthly family gathering. April and her goal is being attained! Yay Sandra! I posted my request on her texting thread and Robert offered to take me. So did Karen. Can you imagine how welcome that made me feel? @ Sandra dared. She said she would like me to help cover food costs this time. $20. I gave her the money at dark as they finished working in the garden yesterday, Saturday. @ Brice and Sandra have been married 12 years. Andrew 10yo is now old enough to legally babysit! They started taking a Ballroom dance class on Monday nights in January and they are loving it. She is so happy it is working out! @ Wed. 4/17/24 10:50am Hello Brandon, It is Springtime! Are you noticing? Beautiful outside! @ In my boM class last week someone said the Panguitch dam was leaking! And that most of the city of Panguitch is in the flood plain. I’m not sure if it is true but if so, it must be exciting at the jail! @ Sister Bolivia does batching review along with Josephina. She emailed me last week that Elder Howard Cheney would be down on Tuesday from SLC and would I invite everyone from the Old Spanish Completion team that I knew to meet him at 4pm at the FSC. I did and Lynn E, Barb W, Kathleen M, Audrie J, Yovanna A, Josephina & I all sat in the low cushion chairs and feasted at his feet. ha. 1- He was asked to help not in Spanish, not in Italian, but in English this time! They are making the 1911 English census useful for delivering names for the temple. And he is excited about it. They will extend system to other nations when completed. Most members can’t learn how to research and get names to take to the temple. So this system will add the names to the tree so they can find them and do the temple work. With more and more temples dotting the earth we are needing more and more names to take to the temple. 1b- The census has 500M people/records in 1911 England. They ran some computer programs to sort out the ones that would be most useful for family history. It reduced the records to 5 M. Those are the prime ones they are working on now. 1c-When Howard asked the European leader if they needed any help. . . he got tearful. Our people can’t find names to take to the temple, he said.
2- The adversary does everything he can to confuse/delay/hinder this work. There are antis/hackers that would love nothing more than to damage the church and its technology. The church has one of the best firewalls in the world. It has spent beaucoup $ (legion\ many\ multifold\ multiple\ multiplex\ multitudinous\ numerous)
creating that barrier! 3- After confessing a sin to him as a bishop he would warn the struggling saint that they would see others mocking them and talking behind their hands. Who else have you told of this?he would ask them. Others will not hear it from me but Satan has his ways. Be strong. Companion with Christ. He will support you. 4- People engaged in this work have all kinds of obstacles placed in their paths: deaths, accidents, health issues. But continue on. Don’t give in or give up. 5-God knows what is in our minds but Satan doesn’t. Satan can put things in our minds but we can identify them and fight them/ignore them/ show them to God. He was a straight arrow as a kid. He would play a little game in his head when tempted. “I recognize the temptation from you devil, but you don’t know what I am thinking and I am going to pretend that I didn’t even notice you! ha. Only God knows what I am thinking. I am in charge here in my mind.” 6- Audrie asked if the emails the church would send to malicious indexers were effective. HC said no. If the FS shut down their account they would just create another. [You may remember that I created dozens of accounts so I could review enormous amounts of indexing in South America. ~2016 When all my aliases were discovered, with my confession/admission. They were removed. But what was there to stop me from doing it again? ] So FS tags those accounts that are malicious and any work that they do is ignored and done again by someone else. The batch is submitted and the written work deleted/or never recorded, and the batch is sent out again. 7- ”What if they edit it wrong?” was another concern Audrie Jackson had. She was referring to the 1911 census they are systematizing. HC reassured her that it doesn’t change the original record, the edit is just added as an edit. That was cool to hear. I have heard that my corrections when reviewing work the same way. 8- Howard was brought on board the Italian Indexing Contract in August. The church had committed to 600k records a year. He revved up the stakes and got them up and running by mid September. Only 29K had been done that year. By January almost 1M had been done.(Italian Indexing Resources By Jesse Hyde January 19, 2016) Since that was published in 2016 The first year of Italian Indexing must have been before that. 9- Is there a government that is not corrupt? Probably not. Howard was sitting in the Joseph Smith Building in SLC where he works and overheard a couple of men talking about how strange it was that Italy was allowing the church to photograph all their vital records. Those records needed to be preserved. What if an earthquake occurs and the building falls down and destroys them all? [It was a huge deal to Enos that this sacred record of the small plates of Nephi be preserved! God promised he would preserve them. And now we have them today! Where are all the other records of the world? Who knows. Lost. But look what we have in the BoM!!!] Howard listened for a while and then he couldn’t stand it any more. He went to these guys discussing how amazing it was after all these years and years of asking the Italian Government. . . and said, What did the prophet just announce in GC? A new Rome temple! Guess who made those Italian records available? God. His hand is in this work. The Italian government leaders who signed the documents giving the church permission were taking their lives into their hands. And we can laud them and applaud them. But God is in charge. 10-Philippines has passed privacy laws that is keeping our Indexing projects from being published! We helped finish off some Spanish and English records some years ago but they haven’t been published yet.
11–Howard was released from his special round- up- people- for- world- indexing calling when Covid19 hit. 12-His DNA turns out to be 15% Italian. French ancestors that moved to Italy. ha. He was shocked. 13-There was an Italian day back at the beginning when 3 stakes sent their volunteers to be trained. Tony Minardi grabbed Yovanna and made her go help some people. 14- Imagine a man in white appearing to you in a dream and telling you his vital information so he can get his temple work done. That is the only way we can do the temple work besides using earthly records. These earthly records are important. 15-People constantly try to give him
credit for the indexing around the world. . .but he just refers them to God. 16-I celebrated the “Your Impact” button in FS. He reminded us of the emails/Notifications that started to help recognize people’s indexing efforts. 17-Audrey Jackson is so dedicated and particular. She is so detailed that she trains the computer to do the AI indexing. She wanted to know what her numbers were? Howard told her that they do not record her numbers because they want people to be perfect/thorough/unaffected by their numbers! 18&19 skipped.
So I just had to stop indexing and record some of the big picture things Howard shared with us yesterday. Can you see why he would be a good catalyst? @ Later: V, THANK YOU! Yes, Elder Cheney inspires by just being open and sharing what he is doing. I should have moved closer, even with my fancy hearing aids I had such a hard time hearing. How did you know?
I did hear most of what you wrote but he speaks fairly softly, and the part about how he dealt with Satan as a kid was hard for me to hear. So I appreciate your filling it in for me. What a gentle dedicated man! His feeling of urgency reminded me of Elder Holland. Those in the know know time is short and the work is urgent. Thanks for inviting me. I’m thankful for my desire to help and to use what little ability I have in this work. Made me wish I knew languages! Thank you again and again. I’d never have done this without your help and support and inspiration. It is such a blessing in my life!
(And what good letters you write to your inmate. You are so observant and have a wonderful memory!) Thanks again V, you are the best!!
20- Yovanna is very strongly opinionated on some things. She hates the accents not being included. Can you imagine if we had to put on the diacritics in Italian? About 5 years ago the instructions were changed from "include accents if you can” to “no longer needed”! She still has issues with that decision! I had fun watching how Howard handled it. Such finesse: Yes, some ë - umlauts and other diacritics especially in German change the sound of the word. But in Spanish they are mainly to tell which syllable to accentuate/emphasize. \é - accent acute (this is the Spanish accent)\è - accent grave (this is the Italian accent)-v \ê - circumflex\ë - umlaut or diaerisis\ç - cedilla\ñ - tilde\ø - streg\ð - eth (capital form Ð)\å - bolle\æ - ligature\œ - ligature\ē - macron\č - háček\ŭ - crescent\(I shared this with Barbara Wilburn) V, meant to ask, what languages are those? Are they all Spanish? All different European languages. Spanish only has an accent. Ha that was my guess but thought I’d better check. Thank you. (You know a lot of stuff!)
21- I thought it was funny and interesting to hear that the AI has done almost 200 M Spanish records (in 2022 it did 60 M) and that they are about 95% correct. . . just about the same as when humans index and review! Man would I like to see how they get those numbers. MAKES ME CURIOUS TOO Indexing is about 90% correct. After reviewing it is about 95% correct. So that diffuses any complaints about AI mistakes like Yovanna often complains about.
So funny! Everyone has their pet peeves, yes? All those accents! Ha it amazes me. And to think our Savior knows it all, he knows all our languages! ALL of them!! When I consider learning a new language, it overwhelms me. I don’t think my old brain is up to it. But I will do what I can and won’t worry too much about what I can’t. Ha Good to know the accuracy is up there. We want to help the work go forward as best as we can.
Btw I made a copy of what you wrote and saved it. Glad I did! Just in time!!!-v
22- Barbara- Why are there double pages on some projects and single pages of images on others? Because the photographers are paid by the number of images! What? When typists were paid by the keystrokes they found lots of extra dashes and stuff. Ha
Yes I remember Elder Cheney talking about that. So crazy. My husband just shook his head when I told him. (I just hope they weren’t members!) I suspect they got all the senior missionaries they could to do this work but it wasn’t enough so they had to hire people. My neighbors the Marshalls went on a mission like this.
Saturday,4/20 Hello Brandon, I finished Enzio last night. 1-His sister missionary felt inspired and prompted over and over to encourage him to write the book. It turned out she just had to transcribe a bunch of his recordings from when he was a temple president. He had already done most of the work. 2- I had no idea he was so tall. The picture of him shaking JEFausts hand surprised me. I admire and like tall! I know it really doesn’t matter but I do. 3- She closes his book with a phenomenal/historical talk. I was shocked at all the deaths in the name of christianity. 4-Possessed-He saved that story for near the end of his book. Sort of hidden. He says that it was one of the most sacred experiences of his life before he shares it. Afterwards he explains the reasons why he thinks HF had him experience that as a new general authority. Very well balanced! What a man. F. Enzio Busche
oh Brandon. . . You would love this book. I sure do!
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