Week 53
The week started with a bang--last Sunday night at about 7:45 pm we had a big (magnitude 5.0) earthquake in Cushing, 29 miles south east of here.  We shook for about a minute (which is a long time when the earth is moving), but had no damage in Stillwater.  Cushing had a lot of building damage, but no people were injured.

The rest of the week was fairly uneventful--good classes, good visits with our YSAs, good Soup Tuesday.  On Tuesday we had our first interview with President Mansell since his arrival in July.  He is really a delightful and dedicated man, and the younger missionaries seem to enjoy his leadership style--once they got used to the changes he introduced in the mission.  Transitions are always challenging, but usually work out well.

On Friday we took 5 of the YSAs with us to the temple--two did baptisms and we and the other three did sealings.  Molly had quite a stack of family names for sealings and it was wonderful to participate in those ordinances.  Every time we go with the ward we take a different configuration of young adults, and we love getting to know them even better in the confines of the car; we also love seeing their dedication to attending the temple.

Saturday morning we had a CES in-service in Edmond.  Most of the attendees are early morning seminary teachers, and I'm always amazed at their sacrifice of time and effort (as well as sleep), and their love of their students.  I am still influenced by Carol LeMon and our 6 am Mon-Fri seminary classes when I was in high school.  The in-service was very good; we worked more with the Doctrinal Mastery process and Acquiring Spiritual Knowledge (ASK) that is being used in seminary to help the youth find answers to their questions.

When we are in Edmond, we always like to drive down Broadway.  It has two blocks of intense restoration, and another couple of blocks of building and upgrading.  All of the old buildings have a plaque listing the building date (often in late 1800s) and a list of every business that occupied the building in its life.  Every one of those blocks has between one and three statues--some whimsical, some more serious, and all part of the personality of Edmond.  I'll end today with pictures of many of them just because they're fun.