Brrrrrr! But good news.

 It has been very cold here for the past couple of weeks.  Most of the week just ending it did not get above freezing, which is unusual here.  On the other hand, we have a lovely glassed-in porch and any sun warms it right up so that it feels like being outside on a warm spring day.  Just lovely!  Right now it is 37 degrees outside, and a comfortable high-70s on the porch.  We have some flowers on our kitchen table that get the sun and live in the temperature-controlled house.  They think it is spring.

Flowers on the kitchen table.

The orchids are a surprise to us.  They were in the apartment by the river when we first came to Maribor and they were in full, glorious bloom.  Of course, the blooms eventually fell off and the plant became unremarkable.  We have NEVER had orchids bloom a second time, although we have tried many times.  But we kept these on a window sill and nursed them along.  Liz finally put them in the spare bedroom, the room I use for reading, watching my computer, and working at my desk.  I made sure to open the blinds each day, but they only got a few hours of sun each afternoon.

To our surprise, we finally noticed a bloom stem growing up, and we started paying attention to them again.  The purple ones bloomed first and now the white ones are blooming, too.

Friday, we visited the grocery store and Liz picked up the little, yellow jonquils.  They were just poking up their heads at that time, but they've exploded into bloom today.

Perhaps the World is not ending just yet, after all.

The BIG NEWS here is that the Slovenian government has decided it is time to open things up.  Starting tomorrow, we are officially allowed to gather in groups (with masks and social distance).  The young missionaries are so excited they've planned an outing tomorrow where we will all meet in Ljubljana and drive up to Lake Bled at the foot of the Julian Alps.  It will be too cold to do very much, although it is rumored that the indoor ice rink up there will be open.  The scenery will be amazing and the youngsters will have fun getting reacquainted.

The other impact is that it looks like we will finally be allowed to hold church meetings.  The last one we had was in early October, and even then it was for no more than 10 people.  It was by invitation only and mainly served to provide the sacrament to those who did not have family members who could do it for them.  The last time we had an open sacrament meeting was in early July.    We don't yet know if we will be allowed to hold fully open meetings next week or if the total number will still be restricted.

I see on the news that the scientists are warning that we could still face a spring surge in COVID cases, and that could shut us down again, so we are hoping for the best and will take whatever we can get.

Liz and I still do not have official visas to be here.  We applied immediately after we arrived in Maribor, and we have done everything we could do to get them, but COVID closed the offices and everything is backed up.  Without a visa, we don't have a government ID number that is required to get on the list for vaccination.  The vaccine is available here, now and we are in the first wave of eligible recipients, but we can't apply.  We are trying to work a back-door way to get vaccinated, but so far no luck.

Doing service in Croatia

 We can't go to Croatia right now.  We can't even go to the other major cities in Slovenia.  We are restricted due to COVID.  But I wanted to share what is happening in Croatia.

First, there was an earthquake in Croatia last December 29, in a town near the border with Bosnia & Herzogovina.  It caused a lot of damage and I saw an interview with the mayor who said that half the buildings in the downtown area were damaged too much to enter.  OK, and the lead-in is that the church sends relief to this kind of event.  Major quantities of relief goods - food, industrial water purification equipment, tents (not so helpful this time of year), blankets, hygiene kits, clothing, and so on.  The missionaries in Croatia have also been part of that effort and they have taken turns going down and working with our relief teams, the Red Cross and Catholic Charities to clear the rubble and get people cared for.  The missionaries provide basic grunt-labor in clearing things back so they can be re-built.

A photo one of the missionaries sent back, showing the damage they are helping to clear.

This photo brought back to me what happened to us in Zagreb last March.  Those triangular cracks are the same as what we had in the mission home, although worse than we had.  I looked out the windows in the mission home and saw the houses across the street where roof tiles cascaded off the roof and landed in heaps of rubble at the sides of the buildings.  Chimneys broke off and slid down and over the edge, bringing more roof tiles with them.  Some of them landed on cars and crushed them flat.

People here have often asked us if it's true that in America we build houses with wood.  They look like they expect to hear crazy when they ask it.  They are firmly convinced that bricks are better, and in many ways they are, but not if there are earthquakes.

Second, our missionaries went out to the camps where the thousands of displaced people were living.  The government brought in little, white containers (shipping containers?) for them to live in, and very few outside people go into the camps.  The missionaries shared stories of taking hygiene kits to distribute to all the residents and having people break down in tears, just to see a helping face.  Apparently the containers provide for basic needs, but no more.  It has been a cold winter, too, which makes it much worse.  I thought the missionaries were going to send us a photo of the little, white containers, but I haven't seen them, yet.

So, we are very grateful to be living in a nice cozy apartment in Maribor.

The Slovene Language

 When we volunteered to come on our mission, we signed up for a mission where no new language was required.  We were assured that we would always have translators available to help us when we need it.  We were, however, offered a chance to learn Croatian through the church's language program in Provo.  Almost all the instructors are BYU students who are "return missionaries" and learned the language while serving there.  Sadly, we were just in time for semester break and we were unable to connect with an instructor for more than an email or two.  So we didn't make much progress.

Now we are here and we have gotten along fairly well without speaking Croatian, nor Slovene, Serbian, Bosnian, nor whatever they speak in Montenegro (Serbian?).  However, you cannot live in a country without learning a little of it.  We know very well how to say Hello and Goodbye, Yes and No, and other simple things.

One of the things about the languages here (they are all related) is that they always pronounce every single letter in every word.  There are no silent e's here!  No slurring letters together until they disappear.  So that makes reading the words quite easy.  Simple rules.  Of course, nothing else about Slovene or Croatian is easy.  The structure and roots of these languages have no connection to the roots of English.  None whatever!

One aspect of it is that they do not quibble about putting a vowel between consonants.  In English we have some words with two consonants (for example "sting" has two pairs, st and ng) and we might have a few with three, but beyond that we just don't do it.  Slavic languages have three's everywhere, four is common, and it is not hard to find where there are five.  I don't know an example of having six or more, but it wouldn't surprise me if I did find one.

An example of five consonents without a vowel between them - from a Sunday School lesson.Skrbno starts with five consonents and finally ends with a vowel.

So, why does this interest me?  I don't know.  There is not good reason, it just does.

  I had my 72nd birthday yesterday.  I would just as soon let them slip by un-noticed, but I live with a pack of females and they make sure no birthday goes by without a fight.  So I caved in and let my wonderful wife make my favorite dinner.  We had a pork roast, mashed potatoes and gravy, peas, and applesauce.  For dessert we had a German chocolate cake.  It turns out that German chocolate is not available here, so Liz began to search for how to make it from things that are available here.  The first thing she found is German chocolate has nothing to do with Germany.  Here is the true story from the internet (so it must be true):

In 1852 Samuel German, an English American Baker who worked for Baker's Chocolate Company, created a new type of dark baking chocolate. German made a sweet baking chocolate which incorporated more sugar than the average semi-sweet baking chocolate.

He invented the chocolate and it was named after him.  Did he have any German roots?  Perhaps, or perhaps his ancestors had a speech impediment that made it sound like they were speaking English in German.  Who knows.

Whatever!  Liz found a way to simulate German Chocolate and made a wonderful cake.  She topped it with the traditional coconut frosting, which was also a problem.  We are used to American shredded coconut that is sweetened.  It is not available here.  Here, they have toasted coconut flakes, and they have dried, ground coconut with the consistency of granulated sugar.  We bought some of each, mixed them together and it turned out just fine.

We even had ice cream to go with it.  Of course, it is quite different than American ice cream, but we didn't even quibble about that.  It was vanilla, which was close enough.  But it was a little hard to find.  They are very fond of Neopolitan ice cream here and it takes up considerable space in the freezer section of the stores.  You can find it with vanilla and strawberry, or with vanilla and chocolate, or with all three, but you have to really search to find a container of simple vanilla ice cream.

We have completed two audits so far, both for branches in Slovenia, so they were done over Zoom, of course.  Tomorrow, I get audited by one of my auditing staff and I will be wearing my branch clerk hat.  Liz will be the Assistant Area Auditor and is supervising it.  I anticipate no problems.

That will leave us with just two more audits we will do ourselves, and we will have ten more to supervise.  Then we will review them all and sign off on them, and that will be it for another auditing cycle.