Zone Conference - October 11-15, 2010

Zone Conference time again, and what a wonderful pleasure that is for President Winn and me! We get to spend all day every day with our missionaries for a week! Just being around them and sharing in their enthusiasm, faith and love for the Savior is a huge blessing. We get to study and learn with them, and my favorite part, listen to them sing!

I've always had my kids around to help me with the technical stuff, so you will have to pardon my videographer skills. I know I'm really bad, but maybe with some practice I can improve. So I apologize for the very bad video taping, and these two videos may be something that only the missionary mothers can love. As for getting the video image out of the little Blogger video cam and into my computer and then actually up on my blog, I'm improving already! The first time I tried to put a video on Mama Winn's Place, it took me literally 6 hours. Now I'm down to 2 hours! Yipee! I am now the proud owner of a set of directions written by Jarom that tells me how to do it. Jarom knows me well. He starts with things like, "turn you computer on" and includes illustrations and arrows pointing to things, with very specific insturctions like, "see this little gray square next to the picture of the house on the upper right corner of your computer screen?......"

Our Tongan Elders sang for us, and it was just beautiful! Of course the whole gang sang for the cooks after lunch, and the cooks loved it!

As part of the training, I taught the missionaries some ways to deal with the stress of mission life. One good suggestion is to exercise every day. After all, exercise gives you endorphins. Endorphins make you happy. Happy people just don't kill their companions. A take off from Legally Blonde, but it works quite nicely. These missionaries sure are lucky to get such gems of wisdom from me!

Bruce had his own take on training the missionaries. He brought in a guest speaker by the name of Elder Mediocre. Our dear, gum chewing, sunglass wearing, nap taking, movie watching, Red Bull drinking, mission boundary leaving, sleeve rolling, rule ignoring Elder Mediocre had quite a bit of advice for the missionaries. They loved it! It reminded me very much of a golden spike driving, CT bashing, miracle hockey story loving, practical joke playing CEO that I used to know. Some things never change.

Elder Blackburn, sweeping up when the day is over.