Blossoms!  Transfers!  Dinners!

 We sure do love these elders.  We have had the privilege of working with Elders Jenkins (left) and White (right) since the end of October.  They are assistants to the Mission president and have been such fun and inspiration for us.  We will miss Elder White as he goes back into the field for the last 6 weeks of his mission. We are excited to find out who will now be working with us as the other AP.  We will find out on this Tuesday, April 15.  Monday night we will get to have dinner and testimonies with the 2 elders and 1 sister going home.  (Sister Young is the sister and we served 6 months with her in Broomall.)  Then they fly out Tuesday early.  Then transfers occur.  Elder Jones has been getting ready for that as he mapped out the route for his service elders to pick up all of the inner city transfers luggage.  They cannot take luggage on the buses or trains, so the service elders picked up luggage at 18 locations in Philly and Camden areas.  Then Tuesday afternoon we receive 1 elder and 6 sisters.  So we will get to meet and have dinner with them on Tuesday night.  Then Wednesday morning we will do some training with the "goldens".  Elder Jones has to show a safety film on driving and interview them to approve them to drive a mission car.  I will be mostly just observing as they receive their MSF card (monies for the month) so I will know how to do that next time. Yes! the Smuins will return home before the next transfer (the other office couple) and the couple replacing them is not do to arrive until about the same time they go, so we are wondering just how this is all going to work...Anyway, I will then be doing the finance part of the mission.  Elder Jones will be doing a bit more counseling with missionaries having difficulty as well as helping out in the office.  We are praying that this transition will be painless...

 Trees are blossoming in Pennsylvania this week.  Daffodils everywhere, even popping up in lawns.  The tree pictured above has large hand size flowers that are absolutely lovely.  They look like they should be on a lei. I was told the tree is magnolia.  There is another tree that has white daisy-like blossoms.  I am enjoying the beauty of Pennsylvania in the spring.  The wet winter has turned lawns green in just a couple of sunny days this week.  We got into the high 70's.

 As I have stated before, we have a large contingent of Koreans in our ward.  Every year they host a dinner in April and it was last night.  Although there were a few dishes from other countries (I brought English Trifle) most of the food was Korean and it was yummy.  You see above some orange chicken, lemon chicken, spicy pork, noodles, pot stickers and rice.  Everything was so tasty!

 This is Elder Jones trying some sushi.  The rolls were actually filled with ham, veggies and pork--no raw fish, so he tried them and enjoyed them.  The AP's have been daring him for 6 months to try sushi, so this was for them...(we won't let on that there was no raw fish...)  Today we also had the usual 2nd Sunday pot luck lunch after church.