Will and Lily Kolditz Mission: We made it through Transfers!!

We sailed through Transfers this week . . . . well, almost. This is President Pendleton's last transfer, so he got all the missionaries in the right place to make it as smooth as possible for the new President when he arrives at the end of this month. With the 13 Elders leaving, and 11 coming in, and all the other realignments, a total of 150 missionaries out of 190, were affected. They either moved physically or stayed in place but had a new companion assigned to them. I had to manually alter each change.

The parts I worried about doing, the programming in the MS-Excel worksheets, and the uploading of new address information into MS-Outlook, were actually not that bad. My notes from the last transfer made sense and it all worked the first time I tried it. That was a confidence booster.

The "stress" came the following day as I produced address and phone reports that are distributed throughout the mission. The reports are extracted from an MS-Excel Database that is huge. You eliminate the information you don't want, and then sort the information into the format you need and try to fit the data on a single width page by manipulating the printing font size and the column widths.

After distribution of the reports, I discovered that one set of Elders did not have their address and phone number listed. That is a system issue, and needs to be corrected in the Church Missionary Data System before you can download the massive MS-Excel Database, and start the process of "slicing and dicing" the information to get the reports you need. So, the process starts all over. After correcting that information, re-printing upteen copies, and re-distributing the corrected version, we discovered that we had 2 Sisters assigned to the same apartment with . . . . . . . . . . 2 Elders.
Well, that was just not going to work !!

So we have to find out what the address is of the Sister's Apartment and go back into the Church' System to update it, and then again download the database into an MS-Excel format and get it back into the report we need. BUT WAIT !!! THERE IS MORE !!!

After I had done it the 3rd time, the Housing Administrator, Elder Johnson, who was out of the office, calls me to give the address of the girls (Sisters), and it is different from what I had been told it was earlier. The house numbers were the same, but the street name was slightly different. ONE MORE TIME !!!!

We will be better at it the next time. After all that "extra practice", transfers next time will not nearly be as scary.

And now for some pictures. Here is one for the Grandkids.

At home in Washington, we have Slugs that are always attacking grandma's garden, but they are not the kind that carry their own house like the slugs they have here in California. (Guess they call them Snails).

Here is a visual update on "Grandma's California Garden"

We have already eaten the tomato. It was delicious.

Here is a picture of the 11 missionaries that arrived from the MTC this week. There was only one foreign missionary, Sister Hurtado, from Lima Peru. They are a good looking bunch.