December 26, 2011

And, we wonder why kids are afraid of Santa?

Belfast City Hall and International Market in foreground

Belfast City Hall

Belfast Harbour

We hope all of you had a very special Christmas and are looking forward to wonderful, healthy, happy, and richly blessed 2012!
Had some pretty sick grandchildren this week. :( Sage with a fever of 103 degrees and throwing up, (she's such a tiny little thing, we hate to see her so sick! She needs to keep her food down.) Gavin with a trip to emergency with a molar that died, was infected and needed to be extracted. Glad they were both all better for the holidays!
Found out about moves (transfers) today. We're grateful for the missionaries that will be staying on with us in this area and sad to see some move on. It amazes me how attached you get to these young elders and sisters in a very short time!
We went to Dublin Tuesday for an "All Ireland Zone Conference." We had a most enjoyable time together. There were around 66 of us there including President and Sister Griffiths - our mission president and his wife. We watched "17 Miracles" (which we hadn't had the opportunity of seeing before we got out here.) So touching and inspiring! Elder Blickenstaff was called out to help with the inspecting of cars and I was called out the last 20 minutes or so to help with wrapping presents for the missionaries who hadn't yet received presents from home. So we still haven't seen the whole movie. We had a very tasty lunch provided by the local Relief Society sisters and a very fun gift exchange. We heard many inspiring conversion stories from some of our missionaries who will shortly be going home. We had a reading of The Fourth Magi, which is a Griffiths family tradition, with the singing of Christmas hymns intermingled. It was a very enjoyable day. Sure wish we could do some of our traveling to and from places in the daylight over here. Traveling anywhere over here is beautiful, but it has to be daylight to get the benefit from it!
We had a very successful Institute Christmas dinner Wednesday. 49 YSA's, eight missionaries (including us), the stake presidency and their wives and the institute teachers were in attendance. We had Chinese take out. (That was a first for us. :D ) We had a great gift exchange where Elder Blick read a Left/Wright Story. What's that you ask? Well. . . go google it. It was a fun/funny way to get the gifts all mixed up. They had "great craic" with that. The rest of the night was Karaoke singing and just mixing and mingling. I LOVE THIS MISSION! We've been called to party, party, party!!!
We spent a couple of days with one of our elders keeping him company in the hospital. Nothing serious, he just needed to have a procedure done. He was only supposed to be in overnight, but the doctor never came back the next day to release him so he had to stay another night. I became best friends with his mother. ; ) I was their source of communication with each other and keeping her up with how things were going with him. I know how I would feel if I was so far away from any of my children and something of an emergency nature happened . . . Oh wait! That already happened with our son, Jason, when he broke both bones in his left leg not long ago . . .
We had a great Christmas Eve dinner with six missionaries here at our flat. Four that are in our district and two others that invited themselves along. ; ) We enjoyed visiting, eating a nice big meal and having Elder Blickenstaff read us the Christmas story from Luke Chapter 2, with the Joseph Smith translation added in to clarify. It's a tradition that we've done with our children for the last 34 years, so we are continuing it over here. Then we were off to a musical Christmas Eve program over at the Cavehill Ward building. Very wonderful program with much musical talent.
Christmas day was spent at a sacrament meeting at the Bangor building with the combined Bangor First and Second Wards. Great talks by both bishops there. One on Joseph, the earthly father of the Savior. Not much of anything is recorded about him, but we can only imagine what an amazing man he must have been to be trusted to be the guardian of the Son of God.
We spent the remainder of our Christmas day at a nice family Christmas dinner with the Nobles (institute teachers) and some of their children and grandchildren, a great gathering of around sixteen people. We finished off the festivities by facetiming (video-chatting) with 4 of our 5 kids.
There you have it! Our Christmas out in the mission field, "Norn Iron" style.

HAPPY NEW YEAR to you all!
With much love, Sister Blickendinker

eejet - idiot
peelers - police
stick - cane
shattered - very tired
nye - now

From Worst to First

Merry Christmas to each of you from those of us fortunate enough to be spending this holiday season in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Last week was without doubt, the worst and best week of our mission, to date.

In 2003, we spent two wonderful weeks touring Scotland with my brother and his wife (Mike & Kristy Blickenstaff). One day on that tour, we stopped to go to the bathroom and found ourselves in the award winning 2002 Loo of the Year loo! It was so clean that Aunt Judy would be proud to serve Christmas Dinner on the floor. You could not have gotten a cleaner loo if you spent the next thirty days working it over for 10 hours a day with your tongue and a toothbrush.

I wish I had had access to the Loo of the Year last week because I could have used it to cheer myself up. I spent the better part of two days in the loo being as miserable as possible. At one point, I even opened up for business simultaneously on the toilet and in the sink. It was awesome! I had more fun than a tourist eating fruit in Guadalajara.

While all this enjoyment was playing out, my companion got me on a plane to Edinburgh, Scotland. When we arrived, I went to bed and didn’t get up until noon the next day. The 34 senior missionaries serving in the Scotland Ireland Mission congregated in the mission office for three days of training. 33 of them got up earlier than me and drove off north to visit a castle. My companion went with them and told me later I missed the most spectacular castle she had ever toured. This cheered me immensely but did nothing for my health.

I’m getting stomach cramps just thinking about this while I write this paragraph. Just this morning, I read in the Belfast Telegraph that Kim Jong-il passed away. I quote from the article, “Kim, who took over North Korea after his father Kim Il-sung died in 1994, ‘passed away from a great mental and physical strain’ during a train ride at 8:30 am on Saturday, the Korean Central News Agency said.”

Let me testify that I am a living witness to the fact that a great mental and physical strain will not kill you. It will, however, prolong your anguish in the loo, even if you are fortunate enough to be stationed in the Loo of the Year.

Anyway, eventually I began to venture out for longer periods of time and I did manage to attend and even participate in the senior missionary conference after missing the main cultural event at the castle.

The conference was wonderful. We were privileged to be visited by the couple in charge of supporting all YSA Centers in Europe. Their training was very helpful. Two of the Area Seventies in our mission also talked to us. Each of them touched our hearts, lifted our spirits and opened our vision. Our mission president taught and testified. The conference was uplifting, motivating, filling, energizing, visionary and just plain good. We loved everything and everyone.

We are so grateful to be serving here and we love the people. We enjoyed Scotland and the company of other missionaries our age (sort of). [Author’s Note: Sort of modifies their age, not our enjoyment of their company.] But we were happy to come back to Belfast Saturday night and climb into our own wee bed.

Sunday morning we got up and drove 45 minutes to attend sacrament meeting in a ward south of us. When we walked in, about 10 minutes before the meeting started, the bishop asked, “Are you our speakers today?”

“We weren’t planning on it, but we are here to do whatever you need,” I replied.

“Good,” he said. “You are our sacrament speakers today.”

And of course, we turned out to be good ones. An assigned high councilor did not show so we just stood up and preached the word just like we were in downtown Blanding!

The sermons were doctrinally correct and it was a lot more fun than sitting in the loo.

Elder Blickenstaff and his lovely companion

Picture Post!

A rip snortin' game of crab football (soccer).

Belfast Town Hall

Sister Blick with Gerry, the self acclaimed "number one best looking tourist attraction in Belfast." (Security guard at the lookout dome at Victoria Square.)

Belfast is the birthplace of the Titanic. "Built by Irishmen, sunk by an Englishman."

This is how we keep babies dry over here.

We had good craic!

December 11th

We had our first official episode of flat inspecting this week. We went to the abodes of two sets of elders. Their future wives would be proud at how well they cleaned their places for inspection. One thing we noticed about both places is that they are at least twice as big as our flat (and that works for me). I’m glad our place is small and very easy to keep up with. Elder Blickenstaff was a little jealous. He said these flats were nothing like the dives he lived in when he was on his first mission in Belgium.

We met up with the sister missionaries when we went to do our weekly attendance records at the YSA Center. They go there weekly to send out their weekly emails. When we were all done we took them to the city center, where we met up with 6 elders. It was their Preparation Day and it was decided that we would all go on a bus tour of Belfast. We got to see the Murals and the Peace Walls and learn a little bit about "The Troubles". Belfast has had its share of challenges down through the years. Our big challenge was that we darned near froze to death! The weather has taken a turn - much colder temperatures the day we decided to do this. It was a double-decker bus and we were upstairs. The back part was open, so the whole thing might as well have been open. It started out being 1 degree Celsius and got all the way up to 4 (that's 33-38 degrees Fahrenheit, with 90% humidity. That equals bone-chilling COLD! ! ! When we got off the bus we walked over to a McDonald's and got hot chocolate. Never was warming up needed so desperately!

My poor, dear companion has had some interesting health challenges in the short time we've been over here. He had a wee bit of an eye infection right off the bat . . . he came really close to his back going completely out on him . . . then he got a major crick in his neck . . . and just recently he came down with a cold and sore throat. Glad it didn't turn into strep! None of it has been that bad. It hasn't slowed us down a bit, but does make me wonder at this rate how long the poor old dear will hold up!?!

We will be having the opportunity of teaching a couple of institute courses starting in January to some of our YSA's that aren't able to attend the institute class on Wednesday nights. We have taken a survey and some have shown an interest in a Saturday morning class and a Thursday evening class. That will give several more of them an opportunity to attend. Elder Blickenstaff is anxious to teach and Sister Blickenstaff is anxious . . . to fix some refreshments for after class.

Got a great view and photos from a lookout dome at the Victoria Square shopping center. While we were up there we talked with Gerry. He told us that he's the #1 attraction in Belfast. They get over 10,000 people up there a week to look at the view and he's there quite a bit of that time and claims it's his good looks that's the attraction. ;-) He is quite the character! (Photo to come soon of this good-looking attraction!)

We had some extremely strong winds this week. There was one point when I wouldn't have been surprised if a cow flew past our window! No joke. Scotland had 165 mile an hour winds blow through. Lots of damage - trees down, power outages. Kind of reminded me of good old hurricane times in Houston. Needless to say, we hunkered down for that time period. We watched a good old Irish movie, Waking Ned Divine, had some popcorn and waited for things to “blow over.” It was almost like a real date.

We got to scope out St. George's Market Saturday. This is a large “farmers market” and is held every Friday, Saturday and Sunday in an old building downtown. They sell everything from fish to soap to crafts to bacon burgers (which is a bun, stuffed with bacon but no burger). We also want to the International Christmas Market. They have goods from all over the world for sale there. We bought some Old Farmers Cheese from Holland for the elder, and a winter hat for me.

Went to a stake Relief Society Christmas dinner and program. (Elder B. opted out of going to that. Go figure. :-/ )

Yesterday we went to the Newtownabbey Ward's (children's) Christmas party. We got to play a rousing game of "O'Grady Says" (more commonly known in the States as "Simon Says,") and "Musical Chairs." We spoke in their sacrament meeting today. After the meeting block we were invited to go over to the bishops home for dinner. They live out in the country in a really big old beautiful home high on a bluff overlooking the ocean. You can see Scotland out their living room windows. We ended our day by seeing a taped replay of the First Presidency's Christmas Devotional from last week. It was really good and we enjoyed it.

That's about it for this week. There hasn't been a whole lot going on over at the Centre because of various holiday programs and activities. It's beginning to look and feel a lot like Christmas around here!

You know the routine-

trolley - shopping cart

yous - you plural

torch - flashlight

dander - walk

good craic- (pronounced crack) - good fun

Sister Blickenstaff

'Senior Missionary of the Year'

Business: Our son, Joel emailed me a one-line summary of the BYU-Hawaii game: BYU was in the rear end kicking business and business was GOOD!

Now that we have conducted the business, herein follows some other stuff. So it does.

Top o’ the mornin’ to you. No one here actually says that, but I know you expect them to, so I am fulfilling your expectations, so I am.

Missionaries are divided into small groups for reporting and training purposes. For example, we are assigned to the Bangor District. Besides us, we have two young elders and two young sisters who are in our district. All of the districts in Northern Ireland form a zone. Our zone is called the Belfast Zone. In our zone, we have two senior couples and 18 young missionaries. Down south, in the Republic of Ireland, there are an additional two senior missionary couples and one set of older single sister missionaries. In Scotland, there are several more senior missionary couples. Remember this, as there will be a quiz later. So there will be.

We had a district meeting this past week. Our district leader is a young missionary from Utah. He is a great teacher and missionary. This does not bear on the story, but I just want you to know. There was another district having their meeting in the same building at the same time. Our zone leaders, who are both young elders from England were also there, to make sure the doctrine was pure. So they were.

We had a lovely (this is a great adjective used in Northern Ireland – everything that is good is either lovely or brilliant) doctrinal discussion about scripture study and some other stuff. At the conclusion of the meetings, all of the missionaries decided to go eat lunch together. We went to a Thai restaurant that offered a lovely lunch special for £6 (approximately $9.60 in Wasatch County money). As we waited for our food, the young missionaries were having a good time, as they are want to do on these occasions. The conversation turned somehow to one of them quoting Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell) from Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. So it did.

The elder said, “I don’t know how to put this, but I’m kind of a big deal….People know me.”

After several seconds of silence, I said, “Do you have many leather-bound books?”

The entire group erupted into sustained laughter. One of the zone leaders, Elder Thomas, leaned over to me and said, “I think you have just won senior missionary of the year.”

I was delighted that they were delighted that an old guy like me even knew what they were talking about. It was lovely. So it was.

You are now asking yourself, “How can Elder Blickenstaff top this?” Well, I am glad you asked. Today Sister Blickenstaff and I drove about 10 miles south to the neighbouring city of Lisburn, where we attended church meetings with the Lisburn Ward. We had a lovely time and even met a lady who knew where Heber City is. Years ago she was an exchange student and attended high school in Evanston, Wyoming. Now I know that people from Heber City don’t always think about Evanston as a potential answer to the question, “What large city is Heber City near?” However, I recommend it should you be given the opportunity in the future. So I do.

Anyway, we really enjoyed the people and meetings. The testimonies were good and we felt honoured to be there. At the conclusion of the meeting block, we had a short discussion with the bishop about the YSA in his ward, who are really a great strength to our Centre. Finally, we were finished and headed out to the car park (a Northern Irish term for parking lot). So we did.

We punched up the address to our flat in the GPS and headed off. Now you might be asking yourself why didn’t we just retrace our route and just return back the way we came? Well, Mr. Know It All, it ain’t that simple! For one thing, the road we came on was closed. Now you might be asking yourself how did we come over on it if it was closed? Well, Mr. Know It All, we aren’t saying, just in case the NIPS (Northern Ireland Police Service) are monitoring this blog. Suffice it to say that we could not go back the way we came. Like many of life’s highways, once you make up your mind there is no turning back. So there is not.

The first three routes that our trusty GPS took us down all ended up in the same place, staring a ROAD CLOSED sign in the face. Finally, we just decided to drive off in some randomly selected direction and ignore the first several orders to turn. This decisive action eventually got us into a roundabout. For those of you who live in Utah and have never been to the state’s only roundabout in Park City, a roundabout is what they build in Europe to control traffic at an intersection instead of using traffic lights. In the United Kingdom and Ireland, where civilised people still drive on the left side of the road from the right side of the car and spell civilised with an s rather than a z, one always enters the roundabout turning left. You drive around the circle to the left until you come to the road you desire to exit onto and then you signal left, and turn right. Yes, for those of you who are still with me, you have to turn left to go right, but not until you have first signalled your intention to go right by turning on your left blinker. So you do.

[Note: in Belfast, it is quite common to add a wee 3 or 4 word sentence at the end of whatever it is about which you are talking. So it is. The addition is completely superfluous and adds no clarity or helpful information whatsoever. So it does not.

Anyway, after entering the roundabout, I became brain paralysed (which is correctly spelled here with an s) and could not decide where to exit. So we drove around the circle several times while we held a calm conversation about the probability of getting home. At one point, Sister Blickenstaff helpfully said, “I sure hope we get home before dark.”

After a good laugh, I just decided I should do the manly man thing – I closed my eyes and punched it. When I opened them, we were driving down a lovely country lane. About 6 miles later, we popped out on a road we recognised (can you tell I have British English turned on in me wee spell checker?) and had an otherwise uneventful drive home, arriving just before dark. It was brilliant. So it was.

Now, you may be asking yourself, “How in the world can you ever top that, Elder Blickenstaff?”

Well, I am glad you asked. I had a wee eye infection when I first arrived here. I had to go down and register with a local physician. The only doctor’s office we had seen was just a mile down the road so we went there. There was a lot of paper work so we decided to both sign up, in the even that Sister Blickenstaff might need to return at some point in the future with a malady. The nice lady helping us asked if I wanted a male doctor, which I did. She asked if Sister Blickenstaff wanted a female doctor, which she did.

So we are all set up and they asked us both to return and have an initial exam, just to make sure they had a baseline on us. We went back and it was all well and good. Until I started to read the handout they gave me about the medical practice. In the handout, I discovered two interesting facts:

1. By law they are only allowed to treat patients who live, “within four miles southeast and southwest of the office and three miles north.” In fact, they are the only doctors in that prescribed area. While we definitely qualify, I just thought it was an interesting restriction on their practice.
2. All of the physicians in this practice are gynecologists. This is the first time in my life that I can brag to my cousins, “My doctor is a gynecologist.”

If any of you run into any of our children, please encourage them to write; we miss them. So we do.

It’s lovely, so it is.

Elder Blickenstaff

Picture Post!

Belfast Castle Goat

Belfast Castle

YSA Soccer on Asphalt

Giants Causeway

Giants Causeway with Sisters Peterson and Oswald