The weather here has been very mild except on Thursday it poured almost all morning.  On Thursday there were only 5 of us working and we couldn’t work in the gardens with it raining as hard as it was, so we washed plastic pots for 6 hours.  These are the same kind of pots you get at the nursery and after planting the plants you throw them away, well not here they save them and reuse them.  They had to be scraped, washed in soapy water, rinsed and the sanitized.  My job was to wash them, and we figured out we probably wash between 1500 – 2000 pots.  Talk about dishpan hands.  At least I now have the cleanest nails I have had in a long time.  It wasn’t boring as we all talked about a variety of things and had a great time.  I am sure we will pray for rain again soon.  There are probably a good 20,000 if not more pots to be washed.

The big change for me is I have been temporarily transferred out of the gardens.  I have developed carpel tunnel in my left hand.  I went to the doctor on Friday is see what I should be doing about this. His advice was to rest my hand and get a brace.  I now wear a brace at night for my bad left knee and a brace on my left side sure not fun getting old.  I had to meet with President Gilliland and tell him what the doctor told me.  He said I think you need to go into the sites until your hand heals.  Don’t know how long this will take but the doctor said that is the best thing to do and maybe with rest I won’t have to have surgery.  There are several women that work in the sites that love coming and working in the gardens once a week.  There is a scheduler that makes the assignments for everyone so what he did was take one day from 5 women and put me in their spot and they were then put in the gardens.  Many of them came up to me and said they were sorry about my hand but were so happy to be back in the gardens.  So next week I will work from 9:00 – 3:00 in 5 different homes.  Looking forward to that, but that also means I have to learn the site tour information, as I have never served in any of these places.  Looks like I have some homework to do tonight. I will be working in the Seventies Hall, Lucy Mack Smith home, Heber C Kimball home (twice) and the tin shop.  I asked if I could be put in the tickets/tour section the following week as this is where I think I would thrive.  There is a lot of activity in this site and you get to meet and talk with people all over the world.  It’s also stressful which for some reason I thrive on.  Don’t know for sure if I will get to work there but I sure would like to give it a try.  The only bad thing about not working in the garden is we have all become so close it will be like leaving my family.  Luckily most of these women are in our cast so I will see them at night. 

The big change for Jonny was he debuted for his speaking part on Tuesday and did a great job not missing one line.  Remember before we left he said he would never sing, dance or act.  Now he is doing all three.  Then Friday night his line was” Jimmy do you have a problem,? Jimmy answers boy do I have a problem Pa!  Then Jonny said (which was not in the script) you think you have a problem, I can’t remember what my next line is.  Immediately after saying that he remembered his line and all was well.  The audience really started laughing.  Many of our friends from other casts came especially to see him do this part.  This was mild compared to the other cast member that has the same part.  The line he was suppose to say was “Jimmy went to the print shop to print up some paybills, instead he said Jimmy went to the print shop to print up some playboys”.  There was a roar of laughter after that one and he will never live that one down.

Our preparation day is always on Saturday but now we have only until 6:00 to be off.  We rotate our evenings off every month so we won’t have a Saturday evening off until August.  We have Monday and Thursday’s off in the evening but work in the day time.  So our adventures on Saturday are limited due to the time restraints.  This didn’t stop us from going out of town to do some shopping.  We went with our friends the Anderson’s.  We are so much alike in our likes and dislikes that it is easy to go with them as we know what they want to see and do.  Of course eating is one thing we all have in common.  Sister Anderson loves shopping, and Elder Anderson doesn’t mind going along just as long as he doesn’t have to go with the women.  He and Jonny find all sorts of places to go to while we shop.  I didn’t think I would ever say this but I don’t think I need anymore clothes, except I bought a dress, skirt and 3 blouses yesterday.  Can’t resist a good sale. 

I have been crocheting necklaces (to do in spare time) and love how they are turning out.  I have already done 25 with another 10 more to go.  Guess what some of you are getting for Christmas? Put you color order in now!!!  That’s why I had to buy the dress and skirt as I had a necklace that matched both of these.

Today we served in the Jonathan Browning Gun Shop.  Jonny loved being there and I enjoyed it too, but I did the history about the house and family and he did the detail about making guns.  I still don’t understand about all the different kinds of guns Browning invented.