A brief pre-conference scurry, and Easter is not what you think

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On Saturday we receive Conference live. The first Saturday Morning session arrives in our time zone at five in the afternoon. We had a sort-of lazy Saturday. We both seemed to be recovering from something; a bug, exhaustion, lack of sleep, or simply laziness. Whatever it was or wasn't we spent a chunk of our P-day napping--not typical for us. In the afternoon we remembered responsibilities. We wanted to deliver scripture-marking crayons to a sister in our ward. Clarissa had brought them all the way from the USA, but we had missed the opportunity of having her pass them on, now it needed to happen. We dashed down there, spent a few happy minutes with her--she was delighted by the crayons, since she had recently switched back to using paper scriptures. Then we discovered she had no effective way to enjoy conference live. Ten minutes later we had her set up to watch on either her smartphone or tablet. This brought to mind one of the other sisters in the ward that we visit, so we dashed off to her place. The road we were supposed to use was fortunately blocked. I say fortunately because we had a delightful run through glorious rural countryside and then went down this tree-lined avenue on our way to Penicuik, which is a pleasant village, but hard to pronounce.


Our informal and sporadic explorations of the Scots language continues. On the way to Penicuik we passed through Easter Howgate. I have realised that Easter is not related to the holiday but is the opposite of Wester. although I have not yet seen a 'Norther' or a 'Souther'. 

Similarly I was puzzled by 'Gray's Loan'. I wondered who Gray was, and how he came to lend a street to the city. Then I saw another Loan and discovered the 'Loan' is just Scots for 'Lane'. Grays Lane is not quite as evocative as Gray's Loan but is more understandable.

At Penciuik we met very briefly with the sister and discovered she had managed to get her iPad into a completely incomprehensible and mostly non-responsive mode. This is the bane of every technical person's life. It is amazing that ordinary people doing apparently rational things can get their digital systems into states that take incredible skill and long efforts to understand and untangle. I guess it's analogous to someone crumpling up a handful of different strings and cords and twisting them around and then yanking. Within seconds you have very complex knots. They then hand it to you and say, "I don't know what happened. Can you untangle it please?" and many of the strings are fragile and mustn't be pulled hard, and you're doing it blind inside a bag, with only occasional peeps at the tangle. 

Fortunately in this case I was lucky enough to fix it. She had somehow turned on voice-over, blind operating mode--but with audio muted so you couldn't hear the voice. A quick tweaking of the settings put it right and we were able to show her how to watch conference. Minutes later we were back on the road heading for somewhere we could watch conference live ourselves, which was supposed to be with the rest of the ward but in the end, was in our own flat.

A brief scurry, a beautiful drive and some interesting place names. Conference was great! 

Comments

  1. ShanaApril 02, 2018 8:31 PM

    I'm glad you thought to help the people who clearly needed your help. And the street names are delightful.

    ReplyDelete
  2. MitchApril 02, 2018 9:25 PM

    I second what Shana said, and wanted to add, "Wasn't Conference amazing?"

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. lisalouApril 04, 2018 4:44 PM

      Yes. We have enjoyed a few very gentle, feel-good conferences. This one, Richard and I felt, was more of a "Let's gird up our loins, make a few course corrections, draw some new lines on the map and then accelerate." (I think that was a bit of a mixed metaphor, but at least I didn't say "literally.") We both felt strongly that we need to make more time for family history, for instance. Actually, Mitch, this mission experience is interesting. We have less time for scripture study than we did before our mission, less time for family history, there is no temple in our mission, and we don't have ward callings. (Although the ward does manage to wiggle around the rules and use us none the less). It would feel as if we were heading for inactivity if we were not spending virtually all our time running errands for the Lord!

      Delete

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