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“It’s not the places; it’s the people.”

After the latest missionary transfer, Pepper and I have enjoyed meeting the seven (!) new missionaries who joined our area. We’ve continued our tradition of taking each of them out for lunch or dinner, and then texting a photo to their moms. Moms love seeing their missionaries, and it’s so much fun to get a brief response about how proud they are of their son or daughter. It’s hard to be away from family for so long, and we’re honored to be a part of their “family away from family” for a short while.

Here are some of the new missionaries…

A week into each transfer, the missionaries all gather in San Diego for a conference. That’s a great time to learn together, and also to see the missionaries who had served here in the Valley but have since moved on to other assignments. So here are a few of the “old” missionaries we bumped into:

In addition, we also have opportunities to hang out with another group of “old” missionaries (although “senior” sounds better). We had lunch with the Quists…

… And we had to say goodbye to the Pages, who were the first ones we met when we arrived back in May. They’re heading home after a year and a half of faithful service.

Someday that’ll be us, riding off into the sunset, but for now it’s just a ton of fun to meet the new missionaries and catch up with the old ones. Onward!

In my fifty-two years of life, I’ve never been somewhere in October where the temperature was above 100 degrees. Witness our car’s dashboard this afternoon:

For the past few months, as we’ve had day after day of hundred-plus temperatures, everyone kept reassuring us it would cool off in October. Hmm. This doesn’t feel like “cooling off”.

Now, as we enter October and see a week of heat warnings in the forecast, those same people are protesting, “It’s never like this!”

The same thing happened when we moved to Montana. Within a week, there was a wind storm the likes of which people hadn’t seen in half a century. As we experienced other freak weather events over the years, we figured it must’ve been us. Now that we’ve moved to El Centro, the freak weather has followed. Sorry, everyone…

We had a senior missionary event scheduled this evening, and of course it was in San Diego, so as usual we decided to “make a day of it”. We drove out early in the day and met up with two other senior missionary couples, the Farrers and the Wings, for lunch.

As we finished lunch, the Farrers asked “what are we doing next?” Pepper and I hadn’t really planned anything– we thought we might head to the beach. But on a whim, we decided to show them around Balboa Park, as they’d never been there. They loved it. Sister Farrer really enjoys gardening and flowers, and we had an opportunity to see so many flowers. There’s a massive garden devoted solely to roses.

After walking through the park a bit, they were beginning to tire (Elder Farrer is 85 years old) so we opted to head over to the Mormon Battalion for a tour. Our family had been there back in 2015, and as it turned out, not much has changed since then. I did get to put on some olde tyme military garb:

After the tour, there’s a little outdoor area where you can learn about brickmaking and panning for gold. We remembered the photo of Kyra and Alex with their bricks…

And I’m pretty sure the same bricks are still sitting there.

And Zack enjoyed panning for gold nine years ago…

Sister Farrer found some gold as well! (And those pans appear to be the same…)

We had a wonderful time hanging out with the Farrers, and they were grateful for the tours. Sometimes impromptu plans are the best plans.

We were grocery shopping today, and I decided to pick up some proper Halloween candy.

For some reason I can’t fully explain, the mellowcreme pumpkins taste so much better than candy corn. And two and a half pounds should last me a while. Woo hoo!

There are a bunch of feral cats roaming our apartment complex. I guess they just live here, like the feral roosters in Kauai. A few months ago one of our missionaries, Sister Johnson, named two of them. There’s Garfield, who’s (not surprisingly) an orange tabby. And there’s Gary, who’s… everyone else. Any time we see a cat that’s not an orange tabby, we just call him Gary.

Here’s Gary lounging on the apartment steps tonight:

There are at least a dozen Garys. There’s also a single all-black cat, who we’ve named Magic Gary since black cats always have a wizard somewhere nearby.

It’s fun to have Garys around– we usually pet them if we’re walking past and they don’t run away (they’re pretty skittish).

As seminary teachers, we’re always looking for fun ways to engage the youth in our discussions of the gospel. We struck upon the idea of using miniature Jesus figures. Today our Amazon Echo had a notification for us:

Good afternoon, Cosmo. Your Little Jesus has arrived.

I went out to the mailbox to get my box of 100 inch-high rubber Jesuses. We decided to call them Christitos (“little Christs”).

We haven’t yet figured out exactly what we’re going to do with them, but for starters I think we’re going to secretly tuck them into the missionaries’ bags. They’ll enjoy the mystery.

A few months ago we were on the Marine Corps Air Station at Miramar for their annual 5k run. Today we were back, this time for their annual air show. They have a stellar lineup of aerial performances, and we were told it was an event not to be missed.

As usual, because we were driving a hundred miles into the city, we felt like we should do more than just one thing. We invited another senior missionary couple to join us for lunch.

As we were chatting and mentioned that we used to live in Longmont, Kristy asked if we knew Dave and Liz Nelson… our good friends there! Yes, we’ve known them for decades. And it turned out Liz was her best friend growing up in California. Small world!

Unsurprisingly, the air show was packed with people. Unfortunately, we ended up parking so far away that we missed one of the “don’t miss this” performances. But we still caught several hours’ worth of good stuff. We started out on the tarmac in the cheap seats (meaning: free).

But the view wasn’t great, and it was hot on the concrete with the sun beating down. We relented and purchased a couple of tickets in the grandstands, which had a much better view and also featured several of our friends.

There were so many exciting things to watch as the planes zoomed overhead. My “good” camera is back in Montana, so all I had to work with was my phone and a little point-and-shoot camera. Both of them were difficult to use in the bright sun, so I ended up with at least a dozen photos of empty blue sky as I attempted to track the jets overhead. My pictures didn’t turn out well, but they’re good reminders of what we saw…

An F-22 Raptor goes transonic (notice the plume of water vapor as it accelerates):

That same Raptor flew really slowly in formation with a classic P-51 Mustang of World War II vintage. I’m sure the Mustang was going as fast as its little propeller could take it, while the Raptor was bordering on a stall. It was cool to see them together, though.

Several biplanes were featured, and frankly I was astonished at the sorts of acrobatics biplanes are capable of doing.

They did flips, twists, rolls, falling from a high stall, and fast dives. Daredevils indeed.

The highlight of the show was, naturally, the Blue Angels. They’re the Navy’s premier aerobatic squadron, and they’re something of a hometown favorite because their training ground is right here in El Centro. They performed all sorts of high-speed high-precision maneuvers.

Their “diamond” formation is amazing to see. They maintain about eighteen inches of separation between cockpit and wing.

It was so cool to see them roar overhead in tight formation.

We’re excited to see them again in March, when they start their show season in El Centro before touring the country.

Overall the air show was amazing (and loud!) and we thoroughly enjoyed it. Afterward we met up with a group of friends at a restaurant called Boomerang’s…

… which the owner sadly informed us would be closing permanently in two days. He’d been in business for seventeen years, but the landlord doubled his rent and he isn’t profitable enough to pay that, so the restaurant is finished. Too bad– the food was quite good.

A great day with great friends. And some airplanes.

Another six weeks have come and gone, and our little family in the Valley is changing again. We loved the missionaries in our first transfer, and again in our second, and now we’re saying goodbye to those in the third. Here’s a fine-looking bunch of guys:

And the rest of the zone:

A few are staying with us, and we’ll be gaining seven new missionaries. Four of them have just started their assignments, so they’ll be brand new to mission life. It’ll be fun.