Cooper, Kerry & Jamee

Dear Friends and Family, Another week down the drain. We hope this letter finds all of you well and happy.  We had another good week.  We had our first service at the Institute on Tuesday. We had a taco bar for dinner.  Before dinner we met with the Institute Council where they were planning upcoming activities.  We are invited to participate with them if we want to.  We will probably do some of the activities with them occasionally.  Some of the activities are not senior-couple friendly like playing car hide and seek  and stuffing as many people into your car as possible.  There were about 12-15 students including the sister missionaries for dinner, and they were all grateful for the free food. We prep, serve and clean up.  It makes for a long afternoon and evening, and we were tired when it was time to go home.  It's about an hour drive back to our apartment. Wednesday we got quite a bit of family history work done.  Our stake has...

Dear Family and Friends, One more week come and gone. We hope this letter finds you all well and happy.  We had a good week this week.  We had a Tri-Zone Conference on Tuesday in Charleston.  Since it is a long drive, about 3 1/2 hours each way, we decided to travel down Monday afternoon and spend the night there. We can drive seven hours in a day, but since we don't have to we chose not to.  We really enjoyed the conference.  We had opening remarks by Sister and President Lyndahl and then split up into break-out sessions to receive instruction.  One of the most impressive things to us is that the break-out sessions are all taught by the zone leaders and Sister zone leaders, and they all did an excellent job.  We are really impressed by their knowledge of the gospel and their strong testimonies of Jesus Christ. Our training all centered on using the attributes of Christ to be better missionaries.  After the break-out sessions we met together again...

Dear Family and Friends, Another week come and gone.  We hope this letter finds you all well and happy.  We had a pretty slow week. We spent some time going to the doctors.  We both went to the dermatologist.  Mom looks fine, has a little eczema or psoriasis or something like that on her nose and elbow and ear. She got some ointment to take care of it.  I had a little thing growing on my ear lobe, it kind of felt like what the basal cell thing I had on my head a few years ago.  They took a sample off my ear for a biopsy, shouldn't be a big deal.  It was my turn to teach at Family Home Evening.  We follow the Come Follow Me manuals but a year behind.  Last year the Church studied the Old Testament so we are doing that in FHE this year. The lesson I taught was the vision of the world and its inhabitants that God gave to Moses and how Satan tried to get Moses to worship him. I love Moses' response, "Who art thou? For behold, I am a son of God, i...

Dear Friends and Family, We hope this letter finds you all well and happy.  It seems we are getting into a routine.  Monday is our P-day.  We clean the house and wash clothes and then our weekly trip to Wal-Mart.  We treat ourselves to a delicious lunch (Taco Bell or Burger King). There isn't much variety in fast food around here and we are too cheap to go to a good restaurant.  We'll visit some of the local sites when it warms up again. Pretty boring, huh. Tuesday is one of the days we schedule for visiting people in their homes either for a birthday card or just to visit.  We drove down to see a lady in the branch who was going into surgery the next day to repair a broken shoulder.   It's about 1/2 hour drive to her place.  She owns a bakery that is attached to her house.  She's the one that provided the food for our branch Christmas dinner.  Her 94-year old mother (she has dementia) was headed out the door to feed a bunch of fera...

Dear Friends and Family, HAPPY NEW YEAR!,  We hope this letter finds you all well and happy as we go into the new year.  Our new year is has been ushered in with temperatures in the mid-to-upper 50s.The snow is pretty much gone and it feels good outside. We are going to start by telling you of our Christmas miracle.  Our kids know about this but most of you don't know about our little Christmas miracle.  Our kids sent our Christmas gift in plenty of time to get here for Christmas. UPS said it should get here on Dec. 22, but it didn't get here that day. When Holli looked up the tracking number for the package they said they had delivered it to our door on the 22nd.  It wasn't here.  We didn't know a package was coming until Holli called us on Monday and asked if we had received the package.  Monday and Tuesday came and went and it still didn't get here. We had decided that somebody probably stole it. On Wednesday afternoon we heard some rustling in the ...