Holidays, Happenings, Happy Times

(pizza) Pie for Thanksgiving.

Not a holiday here! But we did have a celebratory lunch in the office.
Of course nothing is a holiday for missionaries except Christmas day.

Working towards getting an actual rolling pin to make pie for Christmas. Wondering if any of the winter squashes that go by the name that translates as pumpkin would make decent pie.

Jose is already sad that we will leave next summer!

Durk's birthday included treats, songs, signs - The office elders made him chocolate chip cookies and carrot cake and put up funny signs in his office. I think they enjoy him, we currently have some that like talking about various words and language things with him.

Duke, Durk, Duck
because it is very hard for Brazilians to say "Durk"  (and Durk tells people it is not duck,)
 the neighbor calls him Dukey and so they made the cake reflect his names

Christmas zone conference is a temple trip by zone with meeting and lunch at mission home, including singing by each district. Some dressed in coordinating colors and others sang really well. We split our participation so we would be in the office to receive packages (which have come in some really large bunches lately) by joining one morning with our zone for the meeting and the next week going to the temple with another zone.

This year's Christmas decor at RioMar.

 The bananas on the left were dark green but (surprise!) turned completely yellow overnight. So we bought darker greens ones. They are still dark green and hard and impossible to open over a week later and may never change.

Its noisier with more elders in the office - two housing secretaries to help find and prep all the new apartments and a trainee executive sec. We are wondering just what it will be like when we are training double sets of office workers before the mission splits! So far no sign of any senior couples, all our jobs might have to be done by elders and that is tough for finances since it is complicated and takes quite a while to learn.

another week or so, some of them turned yellow.

I'm sure the bananas are fascinating :)

Betania bikes everywhere, (she has to bring her high heels in a bag when she bikes to church) and here she is with some  supplies for her hospital projects.

She had us over for "cha" when we delivered some donations from friends for her hospital patients. She is in a slightly scary area but has a pleasant place with the roomiest kitchen I have seen here. She built a loft with ladder over her living room for her daughter.

Delivering some of the things to cancer patients, they get toothbrushes, lotion, other necessities. She also sews cute pillows and softer towels for children with cancer and appreciates those who donated for materials.

Pillow for cancer kids, girls get pink ones.

Betania has been after us to go visit the hospital and help give out things so we finally slipped away from the office for an hour and found our way there --with some help from Uber. We never would have found her without a phone since it is a large and busy complex.

We went to the preemie ward and gave hand knitted hats (made by Sister Chambers or those she taught) for tiny babies who get chilled. The moms and babies are all living together in tight quarters for weeks, maybe 10-12 in a room that opens onto other ones like it. There were a lot of twins since they tend to be early. We had to wear official volunteer garb to be allowed in.

We really enjoy the Haslams sharing the the results of their explorations. They even found me a rolling pin, a nice bamboo one. This is another restaurant they watched being created that had some good food with several nice vegan options. However, their "chalupa" which they promised to be "really Mexican" consisted of a bowl of decent fresh chips with a little bowl of the closest thing to guacamole so far, another of bean/meat stuff, and one of "sour cream" that I think was the sort of cream cheese stuff here thinned down with lime juice. They say "lemon" and sometimes you can buy little green ones that are really limes to us and sometimes big yellow ones like we call lemons, but they seem to think they are interchangeable.
We thought we were ordering from the dinner menu but the waiter came back and said that menu wasn't good until seven and it was not even quite six so we had to start over with the right menu. So we ate and talked and then tried the "chalupas" from the other menu when it hit seven o'clock. We're not sure this restaurant will make it without more signage or other presence online etc. If we hadn't had it described we would have walked right past.

The building by the office is looking more complete. We are a bit mystified by the filling in of the squares up the one section (sort of in the middle) - where you can see one square hole and another with what looks like concrete . They were like that on every floor and then one day started getting filled over with tile. Mistake? some difference from the rest of the wall? Change in builder/architect or plans? who knows. Brasil is full of mysteries. 

We were given assignments for food for the ward Christmas party which were to be delivered the week before. It makes sense since some are ingredients and people often show up halfway through an activity so it would make it hard to make and serve food. Then it turned out that was just Durk's assignment and a week later Joan got another one ... and we hope we understood it correctly.

We are excited to have a present under our tree!

Ever since our neighbors started sharing typical Brazilian dishes for us to try I have wanted to make them apple pie. It hasn't worked out yet but I did make a lemon meringue to share just in time to get it to them before they left for the interior for Christmas.

I tried crushing their large sugar crystals a bit but I think it still didn't quite do the same meringue.

Cicera thought it was pretty funny when I showed her about four kilos of potatoes we bought to try and fill up the 8 missionaries we are feeding on Christmas day - it's hard to figure how to prep for it since we only get the day itself free from the office and have commitments the two evenings prior. Not much fits into our little oven and we are worrying about the gas tank running out in the middle of cooking. But thankfully Sister Houseman ran across celery! we can make stuffing/dressing! though I am going to have to pick the sticks and things out of the sage I bought.

 Christmas Greetings plagiarized from daughter Bethany

Merry Fishmas (another thanks to Bethany)

This week's random street view.