Happy Halloween!

Hi Everybody,

The Missionaries are trying to figure out how to have a Halloween party according to the white handbook....at our house!  Actually on Halloween all the missionaries are supposed to be in either their apartments or member's homes by 5:00 on Halloween night.  That's probably a good idea!  Not that they'd get in trouble but they could easily be a target for mischief by somebody looking to cause problems.  We'll probably get a bag of candy and let them "treat" at our house whatever they decide to do.....actually we anticipate at least some of them needing to "share a message" with us around dinner time!

So one of the fun things of this week was driving to Owego to Institute the exact same time Zac and his team were running and winning the 5A State Cross Country Championships, and when it was all said and done, we pulled off into a parking lot and cheered and checked all the stats and all that fun stuff.  Then we got to Owego and our phone start dinging and it was Cameron's win in State Cup soccer and so everybody at Institute celebrated with us.  Actually all of our friends out here celebrate with us when all of you do something wonderful which is usually all the time!!  In Stake Conference today, somebody in one of the talks said that you can never tell how good of a parent you've been until you see what your grandkids do.  And that "what" can be absolutely anything from working hard to achieve a goal or working hard to be kind and loving to everybody.  We're so proud of all of our kids and grandkids and everything they do in "Trying to be Like Jesus."  Have you all noticed that music pretty much says everything we need to say?! Now we're not saying that you're perfect.......but oh you're good.....so good!

It's been a busy week here.  It began with having the district over for fried chicken dinner on Monday night.  Since transfers are coming up, we knew this would probably be the last time we'd all be together.  And we are losing two of the best of the best this Wednesday to transfers....but unsaid prayers are sometimes answered in Heavenly Father's way.  Sister Hopkinson and Elder Napote (our two "first area" missionaries) are being transferred after 18 weeks to other areas but still in our Zone so we'll see them at Zone meetings.  So in other words, it's like going away to school and coming home for spring break or the weekend...final "parting" in steps.  And we will get another two brand new missionaries to be trained by Sister Davis and Elder Thompson so we get to transport Elders and Sisters this Wednesday to Utica to Mission Transfers and be part of that very exciting day when missionaries go home and new ones come.  It's a coveted assignment to be the chauffeurs for these great young people!  The only challenge ever is trying to figure out how to get  4 missionaries and all their luggage into our car!  Our Chinese speaking Elder Chao and his companion Elder Flarety (who is actually learning Chinese by virtue of hard work and teaching to Mandarin speakers) are staying here because there are so many students here from China who discover the Church and God and it's like the flood gates are opening.  They'll go back to their country and be ready to help the missionaries when the Church is able to send missionaries there.  It is so exciting!!

Our green countryside has turned from green to gold and red and yellow and with a couple of days of rain is now turning to a "carpet" of the same color and bare trees.  Soon the snow will fly!  So we were glad to get the last of our "far" Seminaries visited this last week.  We're too old to get up at 4:00 a.m. and go to bed at 11:00 p.m.!  We just have a couple more to go to here in this area and then will be done until next spring.  These are good teachers and good kids!  And the kids love it when we can talk soccer or cross country after class or music or anything else that we've gone to a billion times with kids and grandkids.  So sometime in one of those trips we picked up another screw in our car tire!  It was just 11 days ago that we had to buy a new tire and now another one!  Is it something about New York roads or what...this is our 4th new tire since coming here.  Pretty soon Discount Tire won't love us anymore!!  But thank heavens for their tire protection coverage!  

Let's see....what are some miscellaneous  things to tell you?  Here's a funny one.  Once a month we can have "District Lunch."  That's when the district plans a lunch before our district meeting and they chose "bring your favorite cereal and Jolleys bring the milk" lunch.  Then since we were celebrating two missionary's birthdays, we had their favorite food. So lunch that day was cereal and onion rings and rocky road ice cream.  Healthy??  We think not!  But it sure was fun.

I was able to take the Sister Missionaries to an Ithaca Ward Relief Society activity yesterday morning which was going to sites in our little Lansing area that were pertaining to the time Brigham Young lived here.  We went to the site of the 13 days of his formal education in a little school just a few miles from our house.  Then we went to a little rural cemetery  where Brigham's mother is supposed to have been buried.  It's a small cemetery about the size of a front yard with headstones in various stages of dis-repair that's been vandalized in the past but one of the young men in the ward several years ago put a fence around it and they try and keep it up.  Then we went to an old restored home that has the original stair railing and fireplace mantle hand carved by Brigham Young when he lived here.  The work is absolutely beautiful.

The last thing has been a wonderful Stake Conference.  The whole Conference was on missionary work and was so good.  The Saturday afternoon session for all adults and teenagers was held in our building in Ithaca, and among the many spiritual things, we learned about hash tags and tweets!  We think we're going to have to learn how to start posting on Facebook instead of just liking and commenting.  Our session this morning was at the Stake Center in Owego (our 4th trip to Owego in 7 days) and we went early because all the missionaries sang in/were the Stake Choir.  We have a great mission president and stake president and a counselor in the Palmyra temple presidency was there too and they and their wives spoke.  One of the best things was a beautiful talk and testimony from a former member of a bishopric in our stake who had left the Church for some time after he was released and now has returned.  The Spirit spoke to many as he spoke and from our spots in the choir seats we were able to see many tears in the congregation. 

Time to call it a day.  We were just thinking about our discussions in Institute this week.  We were in Helaman 10-12 and talking about pondering and receiving revelation and what kinds of great things Heavenly Father trusts us to do.  It was the best ever to hear the doctrines in the scriptures taught by our students to each other.  When our wills and God's Will are so closely aligned with each other that when we pray His answers and our answers are often the same,  then He trusts us with amazing blessings and assignments.  And if we listen closely enough, we'll hear his loving and appreciative voice, in the "presence of His angels, telling us that we've done good....that the things we do with "unwearyingness" will allow Him to bless us forever in faith and works.  Read Heleman 10:4, 5, and 6.  It's awesome!!!!

We love you all and good-night sleep tight and don't let the bedbugs bite!!

XOXOXOXO  Dad and Mom and Grandpa and Grandma and E and S Jolley

Was that a snow flurry this morning?

Hi Everybody,

As inevitable as the coming of winter is, we'd be glad for Fall forever!  For about 3 days last week the colors of the leaves were unbelievable....every shade of red, orange, gold, yellow, brown imaginable.  Our "hills" were a riot of color and those fall days of 72 degrees were the best.  But today is cold and rainy and even a snowflake or two and it will be that way all week.  So that's the weather report from upstate New York!

Thanks for your notes, letters, e-mails, and cards this last week.  You all may be out of sight but never out of mind! It seems like we're beginning the holiday season already (all 3 months of it) and this will be the first time we won't be surrounded by family for all the festivities.....except for NYC on Thanksgiving Day if we don't get lost trying to get there.  We're excited for the Macy's Parade and hope that we can find a place to actually see Connor march.  That minute or two will be worth it all!  Why don't the rest of you come too!!!  But we'll patiently wait until next summer for whoever makes it.  There are some pretty impressive Halloween decorations around here.  We have two pumpkins that we bought to carve for our District activity on Preparation Day last Monday.  But....we decided to paint them instead and they were so ugly we washed all the paint off in the bathtub when we got home!  But the activity was fun and the creations of the young missionaries were pretty original.  This District of amazing Elders and Sisters most likely will be changed significantly in about 10 days at transfers.  We've been together for 3 transfers (18 weeks) including 2 new missionaries that came here for their first areas in their missions.  We feel like their Grandpa and Grandma!  They've taught us a lot and we think we've been there when they needed us too so it's probably time for them to leave the nest.  What a blessing it is to know these "kids" and watch them grow and increase in faith and knowledge and power.  It makes us think about what transfers have been like for both Carlee and Cade this last week.  We're glad we don't have to pack up and move and get used to another companion!  We're also glad we can text and facebook and write whenever we feel we need to! 

One of the good things of our mission has been when we visit the Seminaries.  We're doing that again for the next three weeks.  We decided to be a little more sensible in our approach this fall than we did last spring.  We're just doing it 2 days a week for 3 weeks because getting up at 4:00 a.m. to be out the door by 4:45 and to our seminaries by 6:00 is a little intense for these old people!  Last week was Binghamton and Corning and those are the longest away and they're done.  But whenever we get to feeling overworked, we think of those faithful Seminary teachers who teach 6:00 a.m. seminaries 5 days a week for a whole school year.  And they always have smiles and act happy to be there......they actually are happy to be there!  Besides our other normal activities this week, we had some of our YSA participating in a wind symphony concert at Ithaca College and 2 of our women are on the Cornell rugby team so we went to be supportive of them.  We didn't know that Ithaca College has one of the preeminent music schools in the United States.  And these rugby players are REAL WOMEN!!  They all seem happy when we come to anything they do.  Another really good time of most weeks is eating dinner with Danile and Eliza Brown and their two little girls, Rhoda and Dacie.  If we told you about them, forgive us for repeating.  They have dinner for the young elders and sisters once a month and since there are 3 sets we get to drive them at least 3 weeks out of each month because they live quite a ways away and the missionaries don't have enough miles on their cars to go.  They live on a wonderful little piece of property in the country with a beautiful home and chickens and they grow just about everything we eat.  Eliza is a gourmet cook and it's an adventure in culinary expertise every time we go and we love it.  Friday night's menu was a pot pie that looked and tasted like it came from the world's most famous chef.  It had things in it that we couldn't even pronounce.  And dessert was a made from scratch angel food cake with raspberries from the garden in whipped cream directly from the cow.  Are you hungry yet?!  A couple of weeks ago they had a bear amble through their property and help himself to the chicken feed! 

Another blessing this week has been helping Harmony, one of our YSA, with her mother who now lives with her who has cancer and is undergoing some heavy duty chemo.  We spent a lot of time with them this summer when Liz (the mom) had major back surgery where the doctors discovered a stage 4 bladder cancer.  The back surgery probably saved her life as that's how they discovered her cancer.  She's now living with Harmony so we help whenever we can.....with transportation to and from the hospital and yesterday we spent several hours at their home putting up cupboards and helping rearrange the kitchen to make it more usable and Dad put up plastic on the windows to prepare for winter.  Sometimes when we see people go through such incredibly hard trials, we think how can we ever possibly complain that things are tough for us. 

We had the normal institutes and friday forum (chicken enchiladas, sunrise salad and no-bake cookies---hungry yet?) this week which we're getting better at with not stressing out so much....except for wondering if we'll have 15 or 50 for friday forum so we prepare for 50 and it all gets eaten.  But one of the highlights this week also was going with the Sisters to teach Steve, a young man who needs Jesus Christ in his life.  Our newest Sister Missionary bravely gave him the baptismal commitment and it seemed as if the Spirit were audibly speaking to him through her.  It's an amazing experience for me not having ever served a mission before.  These experiences are worth all the Cooking Every Second!  Another good thing this week was today, going to the "farewell" Sacrament Meeting talks in Owego of our friends the Ormes who will be going into the MTC on November 10th. They'll then be coming back out here to be MLS missionaries in the Malone Branch of the Potsdam District which is clear up on the Canadian border.  They had requested this mission and will be phenomenal missionaries.  We'll miss them as they're about as far north as the mission goes and we're on the southern part of the mission.  Then we went to the hospital to visit Brother Albuja who is one of our institute older students who has been very, very sick and in the hospital for two weeks.  He and his wife were some of the first people we met here.  We think we wrote about them in the first email we wrote home....they're the ones who held the Owego institute together for several years.

Well, it seems like when we write on Sunday night that it's the end of the week but it's really the beginning isn't it.  This will be another busy week as they always seem to turn out to be but the blessings just keep coming.....both at home and here.  We spent most of our institute lessons this week with Helaman 5 which talks all about "remembering."  What an awesome thing it is to remember the experiences we've had in our lives and what we know and who we love and why we love them and especially that if we build our foundation on the rock of our Redeemer, Jesus Christ,  when the "mighty winds of Satan and all his hail and his mighty storm beats on us" that it won't have any power over us because of the "rock upon which ye are built, which is a sure foundation, a foundation whereon if men build they cannot fall."

LOVE YOU A BILLION TIMES!!!!!!!

Dad and Mom and Gpa and Gma and all our other names.....wait a minute....do we really have first names????

There is Color all Around!

Happy Sunday Night All,

We just got back from a Sunday late afternoon drive and the colors of the trees are pretty impressive!  We're still not sure they can rival the Alpine Loop but it's close....and because there's lots of trees here, you don't have to drive on a high mountain road with a billion other cars.....but we still miss the aspens.  Fall is here and there's that feeling in the air and it's not college football.  But we still are Cougar fans even if they loose and we just have to put up with those here who are glad when they loose....but we're gaining in numbers:)!

We're looking forward to a slower week this week because Cornell is in Fall Break.  We still have all our assignments as usual but it just seems like "break" makes us think a little rest and renewal.  Last week was crazy!  We spent Tuesday in Owego at Zone Leader Training where we got to watch Meet the Mormons with the other missionaries.  Loved it!  So far there's only two places to see it in upstate NY.....Rochester (out of our mission) and Watertown (3 or 4 hours away), but there are pretty strong petitions to get it closer, maybe Auburn or even Ithaca.  Just thinking actually that most of what we do out here is our own version of "meet the Mormons."   Most of the members are strong examples of what we believe and teach and especially the missionaries are loved at the YMCA and the food pantry and any other place that their work ethic and their muscles stand out big time.  So back to driving to Owego on Tuesday.....we were there most of the day and then hauled our missionaries back to Ithaca and then turned around and went BACK to Owego (about an hour's drive) to a CES training meeting and then back to Owego again the next night for Institute.  We think our car wanted a rest because on the way back home the last time, we had our 4th flat tire in the last 6 months.  AAA in the boonies is at least an hour away so we changed the tire (as in I held the flashlight and Dad changed the tire---in his suit even). 

Speaking of things needing a rest (besides us), our oven decided it had had it too and so it just stopped.  Our most helpful and wonderful handy dandy apartment handy man figured he couldn't fix it and after calling around and trying to get someone here and finding the closest date a repair man could come was October 27th, he went out and bought us a new stove!  Could it be that he likes the treats we give him whenever he comes to our house?!  We love our new stove.....you don't have to guess when it's on the right temperature and the oven racks don't sag in the middle.  We are just realizing when we walked in the door the other night that this place finally feels like "home."  That's never to take the place of home-home (Orem) or home-home-home (Salmon and Firth) but it felt like this very little finally homey apartment was where we're supposed to come back to at the end of a busy day.

We had a really good week of Institute.  It seems like there's a special spirit among us all after we've just had General Conference.  Do you suppose that the Brethren would consider quarterly or monthly Conference?!  We studied Helaman 1-4 last week and (have we said this before?) if there's ever a time in the Book of Mormon that our time mirrors, it's that time just before Christ visits the Promised Land.  Could it be that we are quickly approaching the 2nd Coming?!  We so love and appreciate these faithful people in our classes!  We've told you probably that our Owego Institute is various ages from 19 to 89 and they teach each other and learn from each other.  It's been such a great experience to pick up Valerie on the way and take her with us to institute.  She's set a baptism date for January 15th.  It sounds like a long way off but she's got some Word of Wisdom things she needs to work on....a lifetime of habits.  She's become a dear friend as well as being an investigator.  She needs the Church and the Church needs her and Satan is rocking her right and left.  So far she always pulls herself back up.  Our Cornell Institute has our backs!  Our teaching method there is a type of discussion where we just guide the direction of the discussion and they teach each other the "Doctrines of the Kingdom."  The active graduate students are such good role models to the undergraduate students who are trying to figure out which way is up and can they be active in Church and still make it work in school.  We think Cornell is a great place for academic excellence but the students pay a high price when the pressure is so great that classes and tests and meetings and help sessions are held on both Saturday and Sunday.....and they're required attendance.

Our CURW meeting this week was a good discussion on when faith is tested and doubt comes with our young people and we are realizing more and more how much we share with these good people from other religions.  We have so much more that brings us together than that divides us and we're learning to realize what a blessing our differences are.  We're hoping that when Terryl Givens comes for our March Conference we can somehow have him meet with our group.  Another great thing this week is that for the first time in many years our LDSSA is now "table-ing" a few times a week on Ho Plaza.  This means that we now can have missionaries on campus with students.  One of the students handing out flyers last week (a member of the wrestling team here at Cornell) had a "cameo" on Meet the Mormons (he's from Georgia and his bishop is the one featured in the movie).  We've probably only got a couple of more weeks of good weather and then we'll pack it up for the winter but all will be in place for next spring.  We have an amazing new LDSSA President who really has the vision for what can happen here.

Well.....the Red Cross got our blood on Saturday and for the first time in 3 tries I finally wasn't rejected......and it was a good excuse to have "real meat" at Applebees that afternoon (you know replacing the iron we lost).  We miss our freezers and our Idaho cows!!  We'd like to feed the missionaries and Friday Forum a good old Idaho/Utah family dinner with steak on the grill or roast beef and potatoes and gravy.  But here's what's cool.....today we found out none of our missionaries had dinner appointments or they fell through and so we opened up cans of beans and tomatoes and ground beef and mixed them all together with our leftovers and made some biscuits and a salad and you'd have thought we'd given them a gourmet meal.  These are such appreciative and good boys and girls!!  And after they ate, they had a pillow fight in our living room and it almost felt like home.  And when Dad finished singing a song with the Elders in Sacrament Meeting today and was walking off the stand, our little "friend," Mia, yelled "Grandpa."  She's the cutest little 2-year old who speaks both English and Chinese.

But keep the news from home coming as often as you have time to do!!!  Our prayers take a while now because we're praying for each of you individually for what you're doing.  Technology is the best to know what has happened with you all at almost the minute it happens.  We love you all, we miss you all, we thank Heavenly Father daily that you're faithful, kind, and thoughtful and that you love each other.

XOXOXO  Dad and Mom and G and G and E and S Jolley

       

Conference Weekend is the best!

Happy Conference, Everybody!

One of our sister missionaries said she was almost a teenager before she realized that Conference Weekend wasn't a holiday!  We can't quite recreate that atmosphere for the young Elders and Sisters here but we try.  They spent the day with us yesterday eating food and a spiritual feast as well.  The nice thing about having the missionaries over is that they're so completely engaged in what's being taught that we don't dare fall asleep in front of them!  We'll see what happens for the last session today!  Last night the men in the branch invaded 5 Guys for pre-Priesthood burgers....Dad said there were about 25 there which causes some head turning because they're all in white shirts and ties!  We're headed over to our branch president's home with some of the YSA in awhile to watch the morning session and have lunch and then come back here where the missionaries will be back for the afternoon session.  Since we're in the Eastern Time Zone, Conference is at 12:00 and 4:00 which feels a bit different but then TV news at 11:00 p.m. instead of 10:00 feels different too.  Back to Conference.....how would we ever "navigate" this increasingly-to-live-in difficult world without Prophets and Apostles?!  How grateful to know that when we're being pulled every way imaginable, we know where and to whom we can turn.  In Institute right now we're in the last chapters of Alma and the first of Helaman and if ever there was a time in history that today mirrors, it's that time.  We have to be united as families and Church because Satan is trying with all his power to divide us both from without and from within....which the within can be the most frightening of all.  Questioning, in order to solidify testimony and receive personal revelation, is appropriate and necessary, but when one questions the Doctrine and Principles and the mind and will of the Lord as revealed through prophets and apostles, the adversary has a hey-day.  Stay true to the faith!  Wasn't that last week's song??!!

Dad is very diligent in writing in his journal so he should be writing this email!  If you were to ask me what we did day before yesterday, I probably couldn't tell you!  Let's see......Family Home Evening was a bonfire where we went through two huge bags of marshmallows, an obscene amount of chocolate bars and then there was graham crackers.  Someone figured out how to roast marshmallows and chocolate and Star Bursts.  Seems like we used to do that at Girl's Camp.  We're always glad we have the missionaries with us and they have to be home by 9:30 so it's a good excuse to not stay up all night around the fire!  When we think we have a relatively free day to get organized in our have-to-do assignments, life has other plans for us.  But all those other things turn out to be blessings which is the way it should be.  One of the most exciting things this last week for us is that the missionaries started officially teaching the Chiongs, the family from China that we met the very first week we were here.  They seem interested, especially the married daughter who was the one who completely held them back the first time from being taught.  We'll see how it goes.  We're amazed at how much Chinese our missionaries are learning who don't have it as their native language like Elder Chao.  Most of the Chinese here don't have any belief in any kind of a Supreme Being so they love to hear about Heavenly Father.  Also most of the Chinese here are students at Cornell and will end up going back to their countries when their school is done.  Maybe that's the way the Gospel will be introduced into China!  Start learning Chinese now grandkids!!!!

We're mourning with the BYU faithful this weekend!!  How come Tyson Hill has to get a broken leg?!  There's some died-in-the-wool fans who get together to watch the BYU games, even the one Friday night that started at 10:15 here.  Dad joined them....not me.  We also have some die-hard U of U fans that are hard to face so we're glad we don't have to see them today!  Actually they probably couldn't say too much given the results of last week's Utah game!  It's only football!!

In our CURW meeting last Wednesday, we spent an hour discussing the reasons that young people here don't have "time" to ask the big questions of the soul (as Preach My Gospel defines them).  We wanted to whip out our Books of Mormon (Book of Mormons??) and tell them that we can find more answers to those questions by reading the B of M for only 15 minutes a day than all the programs and outreach anything or anyone else can offer.  We've finally gotten permission to have a table on Ho Plaza on campus a couple of days a week where students and missionaries can give out pamphlets and pass-along cards and answer questions.  The weather will probably limit what we can do but at least it's a beginning and will hit it hard in the spring.  We have a new LDSSA president that is phenomenal!  He coordinates the Friday Forum that we do the big meal for.  Last week we had a young mother from the ward who really wanted to do a Asian lunch that we did together and it turned out very good....very long grocery shopping and labor intensive preparation but it was a great meal.  And the Reeses Peanut Butter cupcakes were a huge hit.  So all the kids at home need to be prepared to eat Chinese food at least once for Family Birthday Dinner when we get home!  Our numbers at Friday Forum are steadily increasing and we fed 48 people last week.  Making a meal for the family will seem like a small dinner party when we get home!  Think our oven has gone on strike.  Today when we went to make brownies for Conference lunch it only heated up to about half speed.....will have to see tomorrow what we can do about that.

Well, Conference is over for another 6 months.  This is our second General Conference in New York.  Did you not think that today's sessions were just outstanding?!  

We can't say which speakers we liked the best, but Elder Nelson and Sister McConkie and then again Elder Ballard this afternoon were so firm in testifying of the blessing and necessity of Heavenly Father's word through his prophets and apostles.  Sometimes as teachers we're challenged with ideas that would try and contradict that and we know to whom we look for guidance and direction.  Now to go back and re-watch and re-read and put it all solidly in our minds and hearts.  By the way, the MTC choir for the Priesthood broadcast was absolutely the best!  It was nice to see Brother Eggett again and remember his directing all of us at the MTC.  And when they sang the medley of Primary songs we thought about all the awesome future missionaries from our family.  When did all of you guys grow "a foot or two?!"

So we have a busy week ahead of us and even though it's fall break at Cornell this weekend and part of next, we don't get a break.  That's ok because it's good to be busy.  We're looking forward to Zone Training Meeting this Tuesday where we get to watch the new Church movie "Meet The Mormons."  Somebody in authority in our mission (President Wirthlin?) must have connections!  We hope that this week is THE BEST for all of you!  Sometimes we still feel so far away from family life as we knew it and we miss being a part of that, but we know that your lives as well as ours are blessed when we consecrate our time and energy and abilities, as inadequate as they sometimes seem, in doing this work.  Keep the letters and the emails coming because we love them!!!!  Almost as much as we love all of you!!!!!!!!!!!!!

XO  Dad and Mom and Grandpa and Grandma and Elder Jolley Senior and Sister Jolley