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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.

I really really don’t enjoy exercising. It’s mind-numbing to move around for no purpose other than to build or maintain muscles. Give me a nice open grass field and a plastic disc to chase, and I’m in heaven. Or a volleyball and a net and a rectangle of sand. Or a kayak and a paddle, a trail and a backpack, or any of a dozen other sports and pastimes. Having a purpose, a goal, a point to moving around, makes it so much fun. But plain old exercise is just not my thing.

That said, I don’t have much opportunity here for ultimate, volleyball, kayaking, hiking, and so on. I don’t want to spend a year doing nothing but losing muscle mass, so I’ve been working hard at… exercising.

For the first few months, it was all in the gym. Even at seven in the morning it was a scorching hundred degrees outside, with the summer sun beating down, and it didn’t make a lot of sense to be outdoors exercising. In the gym I used the treadmill and the elliptical and the stationary bike, and occasionally “pumped iron” with some weights. It’s hard to fully describe how un-exciting it is to be alone in a somewhat stuffy room doing these things. But I did it because it was important.

These days, it’s cooler in the mornings– sometimes as low as seventy! Compared with summer it feels wonderful, and it means I can be outside to get my exercise. I’ve been running several times a week, usually clocking around three miles. The scenery is stunning.

But hey, I’m exercising!

A long time ago– almost thirty years– Pepper and I played in a Grass Roots Ultimate league for the first time. I don’t remember much about those early games, although I do remember– and still keep in touch with– some of those teammates and friends. One thing that sticks in my memory about that season, though, was the championship game between our team, Puppy Chow (that’s a story), and a team named Fashion Disaster.

Their shtick was wearing horrible clashing outfits: stripes and dots, paisley and tie-dye, pinks and browns, and an assortment of belts and hats. Their team looked gloriously obnoxious on the field. Maybe that’s why I still remember them decades later: it was a clever name and a clever team theme.

Fast forward to today, when Pepper and I were shopping for some new clothes. Technically she was shopping, and I was just telling her whether the outfits looked good. This was my favorite.

Okay, to be honest, that isn’t a “real” outfit– it’s the combination of three different ones she happened to be trying on for size. But seeing it brought me back to the days of Fashion Disaster…

“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!