Busy days in the Spring

This one is a report of activities and collection of pictures over the past week or so that doesn't fit well into one theme. We have been quite busy with fun and rewarding activities, coming home tired almost every night.

Our beloved Brother Staubach was an actor in a comedy play, "There are also mountains in Hawaii." It was not only in the German language, but is the strong Schwabisch accent. Here he is a little before the play began, greeting people as they arrived.

This is on Lake Constance (Bodensee) on the ferry as we crossed over on our way to the temple. You can another ferry on the lake.

 Sister B. wrote about our temple experience in her Epistle (for those who see it). We have been working to help one of our sisters, Sister Pabel, get her genealogy into the FamilySearch system. We had the honor to stand in for the parents of Sister Pabel to be sealed together and then to have her sealed to them. It was a beautiful experience. The temple president did the sealing ordinances.

On Saturday and Sunday (Apr 5 and 6) we showed some of conference at the church. We do not have a satellite, so I used the local Internet to show the sessions. We showed first the Women's meeting at 4 pm on Saturday followed by the live broadcast of the Saturday morning session. It all went well, without difficulty and we had several of the members join us in the church meeting room (we do not have a regular church building, rather some rooms on the top floor of a business building).

On Sunday, we planned on showing the Priesthood session at 2 PM, but had difficulty getting the Internet connection to work. I finally got it started, but then midway through the first talk, it failed again. Brother Wijsbeek had his iPad with him that did not depend on wireless so he had the session and played it, though we could not do the video from his device (the large screen monitor you see in the picture is connected to my MacBook laptop). I set my laptop camera so that it showed Brother Wijsbeek's ipad and that is what you see on the screen in the picture above. It was a bit convoluted, but it worked.

Later, We got the system to work OK and we watched the Saturday afternoon session followed by the live broadcast of the Sunday morning session at 6PM. We miss having the TV broadcasts at home. It was wonderful nonetheless and we enjoyed the wonderful messages.

This is a picture of our little valley, from the north direction. I go for walks up this way occasionally. Below is a pathway marker. There are these path markers all over the pace. Many people hike the trails, a lot more than is the habit of Americans back home.

An now for a real random picture:

This last picture shows the way they do shopping carts here in Germany. They are locked up and you put in a coin (an American Quarter works) to release the cart and then when you re-attach it, you get your coin back. Real is a store similar to Walmart.