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We were playing remote board games with the kids today, and Ollie was sitting with Alex. On Google Meet you can turn on “visual effects”, and Ollie thought it was hilarious to wear aviator glasses and a little mustache.

Then Alex turned on the wizard filter, and Ollie loved it.

The four missionaries serving in Brawley were helping to clean out a house, and the owner happened to have a bunch of old sheriff’s uniforms in his closet. He didn’t need them, he offered them to the missionaries, and of course they accepted.

They asked me to take a picture of them and “do something cool with it”. The result:

God left the world unfinished for man to work his skill upon. He left the electricity in the cloud, the oil in the earth. He left the rivers unbridged and the forests unfelled and the cities unbuilt. God gives to man the challenge of raw materials, not the ease of finished things. He leaves the pictures unpainted and the music unsung and the problems unsolved, that man might know the joys and glories of creation.

Thomas Monson

As evidenced by my blog over the years, I love Halloween. I have a variety of costumes stashed away at home: Jedi (or Sith?), pirate, a low-effort Waldo, Doc Brown, and perhaps my favorite, Dread Pirate Roberts. There are many others, and I keep all the accoutrements in bins so I can pull them out when needed.

This year, we’re serving a mission and of course I didn’t bring costumes to El Centro. When we realized we’d be attending not one but two Halloween parties on the same night, I wondered what I might use for a costume. We trucked over to our local Spirit Halloween store, but the selection didn’t inspire me. The pineapple hat just seemed… off.

And the chicken hat didn’t inspire me either.

In the end, I bought a fancy top hat: the sort of thing Uncle Pennybags (of Monopoly fame) would wear. Yet it didn’t feel quite right, and we ended up attending the parties dressed as… missionaries. To be fair, that very morning our mission leaders had stressed to all the young missionaries in San Diego that costumes aren’t appropriate for the representatives of the Lord. Although as senior missionaries we don’t have the same rules, we felt like we should be examples. Sigh.

That was last night. Tonight was Halloween proper, and since the temperatures are dropping into the mere 80s, we thought it would be nice to go on an evening walk.

We learned that in El Centro, the people passing out candy set up chairs and tables in their driveways, and just sit outside in the nice weather to greet the trick-or-treaters. How awesome!

So, sadly, it wasn’t a “true” Halloween for me. But next year the costumes will be back.

Oh, and I fully expect that at least one of my offspring will take the pineapple or chicken photos and use them for nefarious purposes…

It’s been twenty-two months since I started using Duolingo to learn Spanish. The app “gamifies” learning, making it more interesting and fun at the expense of a bit of rigor. But it keeps me coming back, day after day, to make sure I keep my streak.

Well, I just hit 100,000 experience points!

My “streak” is a little over six hundred days strong, and this week is also the one-year mark of being in the diamond (top) league.

I think these little psychological tricks– points and streaks and leagues– are a brilliant way to engage people, and I admit I’m influenced by them. At the same time, I think my Spanish is improving more just being in El Centro, surrounded by native speakers and working with some other apps and tools.

But still, I’ll be back to Duolingo again tomorrow. Gotta keep that streak alive.

This evening I was reading an article about quantum gravity (because of course that’s the sort of thing I do) and there was a photo of the researcher at the chalkboard:

As soon as I saw this, I thought, nobody does that. I can’t honestly believe advanced research into spacetime and gravitons actually involves someone writing on a chalkboard with multiple colors of chalk. How… primitive. I’d expect they’d use at least pen and paper, but more likely computers.

That said, a photo in the article of a guy sitting in front of a computer wouldn’t be very interesting, so they probably asked him to write a bunch of equations on the board and pose in front of it…

This is Bob Maddox.

He’s an inventor who specializes in homemade rocket engines. In this case, he’s riding a pulse jet go-kart in the desert.

He seems like the kind of guy I’d love to hang out with.

Speaking of family memes, for years Alex has rocked a hairstyle featuring a bunch of wavy (not curly) hair across his forehead. I couldn’t resist a joke using Hermey, the elf of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer fame.

Alex sent this picture to our family group chat:

Kaitlyn said we should make some memes with it. I agreed– it seems perfect. I went to work.

Through the proverbial grapevine we heard about a local woman who hosts an annual charity event in which she (with the help of other organizations) gives out tons of stuff to under-privileged kids. She’s been doing it for about five years now, and the event grows bigger each year. Kids can come to get– for free– backpacks, school supplies, toys, clothes, shoes, hygiene kits, towels, and a dozen other little things some of them have never had. Perhaps most importantly, they get beds: actual mattresses, complete with pillows and sheets and blankets.

It’s hard to imagine being a kid who’s never slept in a bed. Maybe they’re on a couch, but more likely it’s a sleeping bag on the floor in a cramped little house. It seems like one of those things that happens far more than I’d like to acknowledge, even right here in our little desert community.

Anyway, Pepper contacted her and asked how we could help. She said she’d procured all the “stuff” and just needed volunteers to help unload it, set it up, and then chaperone the kids as they went around choosing things. We rounded up the young missionaries and went to work.

The event was hosted at the county fairgrounds, which had a huge indoor space (it’s even air-conditioned!). There were dozens of tables to be set up.

And a hundred mattresses and box springs to unload from a moving truck.

There were boxes of donated goods to be opened and distributed to “stations” around the perimeter. We labeled trash bags with the names of the kids so they’d have a way to store their items. We spent a few hours getting everything ready. Here’s our setup crew:

The next day was the big event. For four hours, over a hundred kids from a fifty-mile radius came and received things they’d never had before. Here’s a picture showing the beds with pillows and bags of stuff. The kids could “claim” a bed with their things so they didn’t have to carry everything all day.

The police officer above is actually a volunteer helping with the event. In addition to us and a dozen missionaries, there were quite a few police and Border Patrol officers assisting. Each of the volunteers walked around with one to three kids (siblings) to guide them through all the stations. Interestingly, parents weren’t allowed: they dropped off their children and came back four hours later. The woman managing the event said that ensured that the kids were able to choose items they wanted, not what their parents told them to choose. Again, for many of them it would be a new experience. Pepper had a girl named Jazlene, and they worked on painting a birdhouse together.

There were games to play as well. Here’s Elder DeMordaunt playing Perfection with a little boy he was chaperoning.

Elder Legg spent some time just listening to stories from the boy he was helping.

I had fun with Kaida and Zaniel.

As the day wound down, parents returned to pick up their kids and all their new things. One outlying community had brought a gaggle of kids (including the boys I was with) on a school bus. They had a separate truck and trailer to haul the beds back with them. That meant we had to load dozens of them onto the truck. Elder Grush put us all to shame by hauling entire beds.

Here’s our hard-working crew for the day (minus two missionaries who had to leave early for an appointment).

It’s great to see these fine men and women serving in the community. It’s even greater to see the impact of one woman and her vision to help local children. We were proud to play a small part in it today.