What a Privilege!

Our first week at the Park of the Palms was full of activity. Wilmer and the other men were kept busy with putting sheet rock on a building that will become the exercise room or gym. There are assisted living residents as well as independent living residents here so they are anxious to have this room finished. They also have rooms for people who come for the Bible conferences that they have each winter for 6 weeks. After the sheet rock comes the fun of mudding. Wilmer had his first experience of doing that this week. On Monday all the women were given the assignment of cleaning the showers in the assisted living rooms. The best part of that was we got to interact with the residents in those rooms. I really could find no other "fun" in it but it was helping the Park in their mission to the residents so it was okay. Then on Tuesday Nancy and I were assigned to the kitchen to do the baking. We mostly make desserts and, of course, must make huge amounts. Coming into a commercial kitchen the first day without a clue where anything is was a little bit scary. Nancy had other jobs for the first while so I was alone and felt like Lucy in some of those I Love Lucy programs where she is suppose to be helping but food and everything else gets thrown around because of her ineptness. Our chef is helpful but also believes we know our way around a kitchen which is nice of him. My first assignment was to take store bought pie crusts, let them warm a little and then roll them out to fit the pie pan of the kitchen. Then use another crust and fit it to the top. Since we just had dark cherries to work with he said to just put as much artificial sweetener in as you think is good and then boil them down a little to thicken the juice. Okay! I did it and believe I passed the test. We made 8 pies. We also made a ice cream pumpkin dessert, a pecan cake roll with cream cheese filling on other days. It beats cleaning windows and showers so hope we can keep the job.

There are beautiful walking and biking paths and we try to get a walk in each day. This town of Keystone Heights is strung along the highway for a long distance. This path takes us along a lot of those businesses. If we really feel ambitious we can take a side road to a fresh fruit stand. The fruit is mostly freshly picked and is really like it just came from the garden. That walk takes close to an hour so we try not to do that on the hot days. We have had a few days that the temperature only gets into the 60's but I don't make a big deal of it that the locals call it cold and we put on an extra layer of clothing because I know some of you are in MUCH lower temps. The last couple of days have been in the 80's, we can handle that. No wonder many of the RVICS projects in the winter are in California, Arizona and Florida.

As I mentioned last week, for 6 weeks in the winter the church here holds Bible conferences. Each week is a different featured speaker. The one that ended Thursday taught on the book of Hebrews. He has been a teacher and Bible scholar for all his many years, he must be about 80, and it was evident in his teaching. What a blessing he was to us. RVICS also has activities Mon. Tues, and Wed. evenings so we had to choose sometimes what we wanted to do or have RVICS begin their activity earlier so we could still go to the Conference. None of the others wanted to go to the Conference, guess it was too scholarly or something. We were intrigued with his teaching and learned a myriad of things from Hebrews in a new light. This week the speaker is teaching on Daniel. From the taste of it this morning we will try to get to as many of his lectures as we can this week. We feel it would be sad if we did not take advantage of this opportunity. Dad said the speakers know how to put a hook in the Sunday morning message so we want to keep coming back.

This is the blopper of the blogger. Last week I used the picture on the left and put clues that would indicate that the picture was of Kim. Well the keen Rensink eyes questioned the authenticity of my words. I knew I had taken the picture from the file with kids in the 60's and so this had to be Kim and I knew she wore that dress as the picture on the right verifies. And I know that Kim and Darren are close to the same age so how could I be wrong, HA! However, my cycling of clothing and lack of attention to what really mattered, faces, made me wrong. Sorry for those who looked closely and wondered how I could mix them up. Note that the girl on the right does have an itching problem. That should have been my clue last week. And the girl on the left is Linda.

We are both doing well, enjoying good health and enjoy the ministry among the people of the Park Of the Palms, Keystone Heights, Florida.

Love you all,Mom and Dad/Grandpa and Grandma