Wednesday, November 21 

Happy Birthday to Brian – celebrating the day by visiting Milan and Vercelli where he served his mission. What a great experience he had showing his family all his familiar places and meeting with old friends at the church!

I decided to make two batches of cookies to distribute to missionaries and neighbors for Thanksgiving tomorrow. The original plan to get all the missionaries together for dinner kind of fell through. It is not a holiday here, and the missionaries were discouraged from taking time and incurring expense in traveling for dinner. The hope is that they would be invited into member homes and could share a message there.

We walked up to the big municipal park to check out recreational activities for Brian’s family when they arrive. There is a nice playground, miniature golf, outdoor exercise equipment, tennis, and swimming. If we have a good weather week, some physical outdoor activities could be good for the kids.

We received a phone call from Sister Ngalu requesting that we pick up her and her new companion, Sister Prado from Equador, at the train station at 9:30 p.m. Which we did! We got them settled into the apartment – and it didn’t take long before Sister Ngalu recognized we had been there to spruce things up. She was close to tears (didn’t help that they were both exhausted and hungry). 

 I hurried back home and fixed some grilled cheese/turkey sandwiches and sliced some apples and oranges for their late snack. . . their fridge was pretty bare.

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Thursday, November 22 

 Thanksgiving. . . and Happy Birthday to Angela – celebrating by helping with a family feast at “our” family home and receiving a mini pig as a present?

It rained all day – kind of a dismal day. The plan to have a big missionary Thanksgiving dinner didn’t happen. It’s not a holiday here, so time and money for traveling everyone wasn’t okayed.

We did have District meeting in Faro to meet the new missionaries. The Zone Leaders conducted a Zoom Zone meeting before the District meeting. My summary of the meeting is that they discussed Pres. Fillmore’s weekly “carta” and plans for the World-wide Day of Service of December 1. During the zoom meeting, Merl and I made a quick trip to the Faro Elders’ apartment to check on the contracted work done. Hope it is enough to please the landlady at time of closing the apartment.

We gave each missionary a sack of homemade cookies – then took cookies to the two sets of Olhao Elders. Fortunately, I brought some holiday cellophane bags from home that helped make our meager Thanksgiving offering a bit more festive.

It was a hot soup kind of day. . . so I made a big batch of chicken vegetable soup and shared with the Sisters. This cold and wet day needed a warm boost. We then did some grocery shopping to stock up on some food. We will be feeding a crowd for a week.

New Faro District of the Algarve Zone:  Elder Alves, Elder Patricio, Elder Payne, Elder Howard, Sister Chagas, Sister Larson, Sister Prado, Sister Ngalu

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Friday, November 23 


 Happy Birthday to my brother K. Jay. Can’t believe we are all getting so old! Hope you had a wonderful day. . . you deserve it!

Black Friday – even here where they don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, they have Black Friday sales. We had an appointment at 8:00 for the “big” maintenance service for the car. Merl was concerned about possible traffic issues on the way to Faro due to crazy shoppers. We actually were almost the only car on the road most of the way. We arrived at the Toyota dealership at 7:45 a.m. - and had to wait until 8:00 for the doors to open. This checkup was extensive: changed all fluids, rotated and balanced tires, hybrid battery checks, … They said it would be done at 12:30.

After sitting in the waiting room and checking out new cars in the display room,we decided to take a walk and explore what might be interesting. Our find of the day was AKI – a big store that I would compare to a high-end Lowes with an extra splash of class. There Christmas section was particularly interesting to me. . . Merl liked the caulks, varnishes, and wood fillers – also the electrical area. A good find for future projects. Thc car was finished about 1:00 p.m.. The next problem was that there was no one in the mission office to do the bank transfer to pay for the service. We had planned to use our PC card (it didn’t work), and it was P-Day for the office Elders. They said it would be a while before they could get back to the office.
 

Since we couldn’t take the car without paying the bill, we crossed the busy street to get to the Forum where we did some window shopping and checking out some Christmas décor stores. We stopped for lunch at one of our favorite places in the mall for a bowl of fresh pasta. We leisurely waiting for a call from Toyota notifying us that the bank transfer had been completed and we could come pick it up. It was 4:00. So today (8 hours) was spent in Faro.

That evening we helped the Sisters with some transportation.

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Saturday, November 24

I got up early this morning and cleaned out the refrigerator and organized the kitchen. After fixing breakfast, we studied and read scriptures. . . time flies when you are having fun. It was after 1:00 when we ventured out (it had been raining most of the morning). We found Vodafone closed so we hope we don’t run out of our internet service before Monday when they will be open again.

The market was closing up early today, too. I think the rain was a real “damper” on everything today. I did find one booth that had some honey that wasn’t all packed up. I love my fresh honey on plain greek yogurt for breakfast.

We stopped by a little Chinese store and bought a little Christmas tree to set on a table in our apartment. Then I noticed tables with umbrellas lining one of the main streets. We found an Artison fair that was closing up, too. Had we known about it, we would have been out of the house earlier – I love local crafts. We were luck to find a table with hand-carved wood items; and I found a nativity set that we really liked. . . carved by Fernando Martins. We were both excited about this purchase.

Up the street a ways, was a booth that sells little porcelain birds – hand made and painted . . . and they chirp when you put some water in them and blow. We had to have one of them. It is advertised as a traditional musical instrument in the Portuguese culture dating back to the 17^th century – Possorinhos.

We then went back home for a little lunch and to set up my little Christmas tree along with some garland that was left behind by the previous senior couple.

We ventured out again to look for some simple things made of cork for possible Christmas presents, but almost everything closes early on Saturday. Instead, we walked around a an area of the city new to use and took a few pictures.

We received a call from Sister Wilson who was having some side effects from a prescribed medication. We recommended consulting with a a pharmacist and the doctor before continuing its use. She said she would. We will follow up with her on Sunday when we return to Portimao.

After dinner, Sister Ngalu and Sister Prado stopped by to visit and to bake a pan of brownies forElder Payne’s birthday tomorrow. They shared a couple before returning home.