Month: March 2025

Six weeks (a transfer) seem to fly past. Another group of missionaries is heading out to new assignments. We’ll miss some of these amazing men and women.

Sister Jones:

Elder Glassey:

Sister Olsen:

For some reason these fifteen missionaries seemed to click really well. It’s been awesome to be a part of the work with them.

Somehow this second group photo captures the spirit of the group a bit better:

Onward and upward!

Because I’m such a nice guy, I occasionally make a bunch of chocolate-chip cookies for the missionaries. Last week I whipped up a batch.

After baking them, I sampled a few (quality control is very important!) and realized they tasted… off. Too salty. And they didn’t flatten out much; they were sort of hemispherical. A few had burned because I’d used a dark pan. Hmm.

I thought about it a bit and realized I’d not only used the wrong measuring spoon and put in three times the salt, I’d used baking powder instead of baking soda. Big mistake. That said, the missionaries all devoured the cookies and told me they were fine.

But it didn’t sit right with me, and today I made another batch. I was more careful with my measurements, and double-checked my ingredients. The result was much better.

The lesson: follow the recipe. In life, there are things we should be doing, and if we stray too much from the path, we find ourselves in a bit of a mess. Too salty. Shaped wrong. Burned.

I know what I need to be doing. Am I doing it? Am I following my recipe?

We’ve had enough pizza parties with the missionaries that now they ask when we’ll host another one. Who are we to deny them such pleasures in life? Our apartment isn’t very big, so we have to split them up. First the guys.

The next night, the gals came over.

Alas, we’ll only have a few more of these before we finish our mission…

Tonight was a senior missionary event in San Diego, so as usual we went west early to spend some time in the city beforehand. We did our best to organize some activities with friends, but schedules didn’t match up. We managed to get lunch at Which Wich (third on my list of best sandwich joints) with the Knudsens:

We really wanted to go on a hike (we don’t get much opportunity to hike during our mission) and we had about three hours, so we headed up to Poway to see the legendary Potato Chip Rock. The trail is almost eight miles out and back, which meant we had to hustle. There was a lot of uphill. A lot.

I had to stop to meditate for a moment.

At last we reached the summit of Mount Woodson, where the famous rock formation is. It’s pretty cool!

From the top, the Poway area is spread out below. In the far distance is the Pacific Ocean. What a view!

The clock was ticking, so we hustled back down the trail and managed to make it to the mission event with about three minutes to spare. Nice!