General Conference

Because General Conference is broadcast in the middle of the night here (sessions start at 11:00 pm and 3:00 am our time), we don't get to watch it live at church. We don't have a satellite dish or even internet available at the church building so we can't watch the rebroadcasts of it the next week either. Instead, the Church sends us DVDs in English and Russian and we watch them as soon as we can after the DVDs arrive. Some people have watched all or parts of Conference on the internet at home, but the young missionaries and some of the members don't have internet access. We met yesterday and today at the branch to watch. We suggested holding it at our home because we could watch it more comfortably there, but according to Russian law we can't do that without unregistering the branch building and reregistering our home as our new place of worship. Here's the building we use:Inside it's not very big--the length is about the size of the light pink to the edge of the picture.

For all the sessions combined over two days we had a total of 7 investigators who watched anywhere from one talk to 3 sessions, 6 missionaries, and 12 members.

The Russians watched the Russian DVD in the main room and five of the six missionaries watched in English in the other. Between meetings we had food. Saturday we bought sandwiches and Sunday a few people brought quick breads and brownies.(below) The Amerikanskis--We did have one investigator who speaks
limited English join us for half of one session

Conference was AWESOME! Dave's favorite talk was by President Packer; Arline's was by President Uchtdorf. After it was over, several of the missionaries just sat and watched the scenes around Temple Square and the Conference Center. It was so good to see home!

We're still enjoying nice weather. We often walk home at night carrying our jackets. One night last week a woman walked past us, looking at us the whole time. We thought she was going to fall off the curb and break her neck as she turned around to look at us. My guess is she was looking to see what insane people look like! We've been told the Russians don't dress for the weather, they dress for the time of year. Now they're all bundled up--they love their warmth! Once it dips much below about 20̊ C (68̊ F), they turn the heat on in the buses. We are ALWAYS plenty warm, at least for now, even Arline who was often cold at home. The way heat works here is that they heat all buildings with hot water running through pipes throughout all the cities. They admittedly overheat the buildings (typical government wastefulness). Like I said, the Russian love their warmth. In our apartment in Barnaul we could turn the radiators off. In our new apartment we don't have turnoff valves. The radiators aren't working very well and the landlady said she'll get them fixed. We think they're working too well, especially since there isn't a way to turn them off. You can have heat or you can have . . . heat. We've been told that when the apartment gets too hot we should just open the screenless windows. For a while we tried that, but gave up on that when the mosquitoes got too bad--fortunately they're slowly going away. At the church the Elders turned off the radiators only to have people from the apartments above us come down and complain that they were cold because that turned off their heat as well.

This week's Russianism:
We have another new grandchild! Ryan was born on his due date (just like his older sister). This birth was a little easier on us because we'd already missed the birth of one grandchild, but we're still looking forward to seeing him next year. We're already kind of met him--we Skyped, he slept.

Ryan Stanley Holbrook

Sunday, October 2, 2011, 7:00 am
8 lbs 4 oz, 20.75 inches long