The Elder Barr Blog

How are you doing? I noticed there is no email in my box. That is alright. I hope you are all doing great.

First of all, Andy, I hope you had a great birthday. I wanted to write you something, but we had a power outage in the apartment last Wednesday and it was a bit of a mess. Anyway, I am so proud of you turning 16. I hope you have a great year. Things are going so fast. I love you so much.

Second, transfers came and went. I got transferred, kind of. The SP/PG branch is going so well, so it was decided that there would be a full-time SP/PG companionship. I am companions with my district leader/roommate Elder Brown. I have lived with him for almost 6 months now, so I know him pretty well. He is a great guy. Anyway, we will be working both the Newtown and the Danbury wards. Great things have been happening in both wards.

Starting last Wednesday…after a huge windstorm, the power went out. So, we didn’t by groceries, and spent a lot of the p-day making arrangements, and trying to find a non-cordless phone. It was interesting. It has been cold/snowy lately, so the apartment cooled down pretty fast. On Wednesday night, we went on a split. And I went with T***** K***** to teach D*** B******. The appointment went really well. He is such a great guy, and we are excited for him to get baptized.

By the way, this reminds me.T***** and I were talking and it turns out he was in the Potomac North ward too, around the same time we were. So, it was great talking about all the common people that we knew. He remembered a lot of the big events in the ward, and knew all the same stories that I did. He is about 10 yrs older that me, and he said he faintly remembered you, Mom and Dad. I’ll show him a family picture to see if he remembers us.

Anyway, Wednesday night, went to bed, house at about 67 degrees. Wake up Thursday morning. House at 50 degrees. No way we are staying much longer. We have got things to do, like “Thursday planning", that takes a few hours, and it would be difficult to do at a cold apartment with one phone line and 2 companionships. So, we called Bro. R***** our ward mission leader. He let us come over, since he works from home. We showered there, and then we did some planning and study. The planning went really well.

Thursday we went on another split, and the teaching went well. Friday we had another split, and I was teaching D*** B****** again. It was at the C*****’s house. It was another great lesson, and we watched part of the general conference DVD that we had, and answered some of his questions. His baptism is on the 25th of Feb. It will be great.

On Saturday morning we had the Q***********’s, which is our Ecquadorian family. They are great. We showed them the conference talk by Elder Ballard, called “What matters most is what lasts longest", which is all about the family, and she loved it. She was interrupted by a phone call, so she grabbed the phone and said, “We don’t need nothing!", and kept watching conference. She is a great lady, and very worried about the well-being of her family. When we taught her about the law of the fast, we fasted that her husband would join us in our discussions. So far nothing but we remain faithful. She went to church last Sunday and she loved it.

That leads into Church. D*** went to the English ward, and the Q*********** went to the branch. We went on a split for Sacrament meeting, which was weird but it worked out. The SP/PG group had 45 people in it, which was great. It is really taking off. Some Hispanic less-actives that we have been working with for quite a while came for the first time in a long time, and we are excited for that. The group leader is President Seely, who just returned from Mexico where he servered as a mission president in one of the missions there.

After church on Sunday, we were richly blessed by the guidance of the Spirit to visit a certain family. We had made plans to visit them later in the day, but as we drove by their street, I felt a strong impression to visit them now. So, I turned and told Elder Ferreira, “Let’s visit them now". So, we visited with them and had a great visit. It was the perfect time to, because the husband was just about to leave for the week (he works in NH, but his family hasn’t moved yet). Their kids have gone a bit wayward lately, so we are going to try to strengthen them as much as possible. Anyway, the point of the story was that it was so wonderful to be given a prompting, have acted on it, and to see the results. This really is God’s work and He wants it to succeed.

On Monday I had to go into the mission office to fix some of the computer problems they were having. I have had to do that a lot lately. This was part 2 of a set of visits I had to make to upgrade the entire office. The Church uses a corporate version of XP, and each mission office VPN’s into a large private class A church network, over a local DSL. Anyway, we were having some slowness issues, and the computers were recieving all sorts of bad packets. This was diagnosed after staring at some TCP dumps care of Ethereal. Anyway, nearing the end of the night, I started thinking…."this is an LDS class A network….with a very strong firewall on our side….the computers are named Nephi, Alma, etc,….this is an LDS class A network….let’s rename those boxes.” So, I renamed them to much more unique names. Also, we switched out the 100BaseT hub for 10/100 Switch, and things worked MUCH better. It was great.

Today was transfer day, and I got Elder Brown. We shopped, and now we did email, and that is it to this point.

Anyway, I love you all. Thank you so much for everything. Sorry I haven’t been very good at writing lately. I love you all so much. Please send me a hard copy of whatever you were planning to send today.

I love you all so much. My God bless you all and keep you safe and happy.

Love,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

Thanks for the great email. I really enjoy hearing from each of you. Things have gone fairly well this week.

Yesterday I was in the mission office from 8:00 am till 10:00 pm. The Church sent us a bunch of new software, and each computer had to be upgraded and reconfigured. Plus, there isn’t a whole lot of documentation on exactly how certain things are supposed to work, so it was a bit of a challenge. For example, there is a program called Mission Office System (MOS), that we just got an update for, and it requires that the computers be networked together. That part was fine, they were already networked using the church-approved setup (which was a little strange…there was some IPX stuff, some Novell stuff, in addition to regular TCP). Anyway, I got all the software installed, the shares set up correctly, and everything, and the computers have trouble talking to each other over MOS. They can share files fine over regular TCP/windows file sharing, but it doens’t work well through MOS. I found some of this stuff out while sitting in the mission office at 9:30 PM running ethereal to scan the network…..there is a lot involved in missionary work that you just can’t anticipate.

So, pretty soon it will be a certain important landmark in my mission. That is pretty cool to think about. I like Danbury, although it has its quirks. Overall it is pretty cool.

Oh, you had asked about what I wanted to do after my mission, so we can start working on college apps and stuff. I think BYU computer science would be good, but I wouldn’t mind giving University of Washington another try. It would be nice to live near home, especially after 2 years away. What are some other good WA schools? Anyway, for graduate work, there is a man in our ward, (former) Bishop Smith, who works for Pfizer. He is a microbiologist, and I was asking him how computer science related to that. He said that they try to have sophisticated computer simulations of the human body so that they can try to predict what certain chemicals and medicines will do to the body. That method is much better than the “eat this and tell me what gets better” method. Anyway, that would be fascinating. I am not sure what would be required to go in that direction, but I’m sure that would be interesting/high paying. Anyway, when he told me about that it sounded like something to look in to.

Our investigator pool is pretty strong right now. We have D***, who is doing great. We had a good lesson with him on Sunday. It snowed a lot and they cancelled church, so we had a member, Bro. B., come and teach with us. Bro. B. joined the church 8 years ago, and he is a great teacher because he makes things very real and down to earth. Anyway, D*** is progressing well and I think that things will go smoothly with him.

We have the O****’s, from Argentina. They have been sick lately, and we haven’t been able to meet with them. We are going on a split tonight and my companion and Bro. R***** should see them tonight. That will be great. He is supposed to get baptized this Sunday, but he still needs an interview.

We have B*** and B**, who we are teaching at Bishop Smith’s house on Thursday. I am really excited for that lesson. B*** and B** are both semi-retired engineers and they came in contact with the church while visiting Temple Square. We met with them a while ago, but then the holidays came and we weren’t able to meet for a while. Anyway, I gave them a call and we set this thing up for Thursday. It should be great.

Anyway, the work is going great. We have been challenged by Elder Ballard to contact 10 people per day per missionary (20 / companionship), independent of tracting. So, we have been doing a lot of street contacting. There are a lot of great people to be found and I know that the Lord will bless us for our efforts, although it could be in an indirect fashion.

By the way, next cycle we are studying The Family Proclamation as a mission. I am really excited for that. I love that document. It has so much good doctrine in it. We have been using it quite a bit lately.

Thanks for everything. Thank you for the extra money also. I will try to send some mail out today. It is only 2:00, so I should have some time.

One last funny story….last Wednesday we had a correlation meeting in the evening. One of the ward missionaries, Bro. S******, was there. His first name is Steve. As we were leaving the meeting, someone called out “bye Steve". I thought, “what? who’s calling me that? It’s Elder Barr…". Then S**** S****** reacted and I realized the situation. It was just funny to hear my 1st name in a way that could have referenced me. It threw me off for a second.

Anyway, I better be going.
I love you all so much. Thanks for the emails. They are appreciated.

Thanks for the great letter. And sorry I haven’t been able to write. I literally have had 0 time the last few P-DAYS. It isn’t just napping all day. I won’t even have the full 30 mins to email today, as I am going on a split with the Bishop in about 40 minutes.

Things have been going great.

1st, I had a cool experience on Jan 1st that I forgot to mention. It was the first meeting of the Spanish/Portuguese branch that we have been working with, and it was great. We had 18 out, which was good. I got to bless the Sacrament in Spanish, and my companion got to do it in Portuguese.

Last Sunday we had 31 at the branch, and the local Priesthood blessed the sacrament and we passed it. Hopefully they can be self-sufficient completely soon, but it is nice to help out as well.

The last few days have been good. I had one more trip to New Caanan to have a zone conference yesterday. It was great. President Boren spoke about the transition between teenage, missionary, and disciple. In other words, knowledge, doing, and becoming, respectively. It was a great conference and I came away with some great ideas.

Also, in my cyclic interview with President Boren, we talked about a lot of important things that will help Elder Ferreira and I work the area more effectively. It is a fun challenge to balance 3 languages/cultures, but it is a great work. I love it.

The weather here has been cold and snowy/rainy. But, things have been nice. I put a bunch of stuff to the dry cleaners tonight, and I missed the 10:00 am cutoff, so they have to keep it overnight.

Anyway, I was wondering if you could send a little $$. I have had to dip in to personal funds quite a bit (dry cleaning, supplies, area maps that we made, etc.), and it would be nice to have some extra. Anyway, whatever you can do would be greatly appreciated.

Tell Grandma G***** I loved the sweater. I will write her a note next P-day. I promise. We literally ran out of time today. The office called with some computer questions, I had to get a haircut, clean the apartment, and the landlord invited us to lunch so that was nice. But there never is enough time.

Alright, I need to go. It is 5:26 and we need to get home, clean up, and go on a split. We have this great new investigator, D*** *., who will be baptized on the end of the month. More about him next week.

I love you all so much and thank you so much for all that you do. I promise to send more written stuff and a longer email next week.

Love,
Elder Stephen J. Barr

Thanks for the great email. I really appreciated it. It was funny, reading about Andy launching the potato cannon at 2:00am. I am sitting here in the Danbury library laughing and a few people stared. Oh well, I’m used to stares at this point.

The work has been going great. I just got back from Scarsdale. Elder Brown and I went there yesterday to help President Boren at the office for “a few hours". One of the computers crashed and I had to put all the stuff back on. OI figured out how the church wanted things it was pretty easy. Also, on one of the boxes it has some MBR protector and I was trying to make changes and it kept reverting them so I had to go into the BIOS and disable it. Which reminds me, I should probably have reenabled it.

Also, President’s computer’s hard drive was starting to go bad, and the first thing that went was the registry. So, I yanked the HD from his computer, put it in another one, and recovered all the stuff that I could. He went out and bought a new HD and I installed it, put the new OS, and put his stuff back on. The last thing I had to do was work on some Excel spreadsheet stuff. They had a sheet that listed the performance of every companionship over 1 month, with a different sheet for each week, graphing the key indicators. Anyway, they had had formulas in the sheet before, but everytime the made changes it would break. Anyway, I re-applied the formulas, added some new ones, and used Excel’s “Protection” feature to lock all the stuff it place. It was pretty cool. I’ll probably get called back in as there are a lot of reports generated by hand off of that sheet that would be pretty straightforward to automate.

The proselyting work in Danbury is going well. We have been trying to tract in the English areas, and street contact in the Spanish/Portuguese areas, and that has been a good use of time. It is so much harder to find English speaking investigators than those from other countries. However, the work goes on.

The new year went by uneventfully. We had to be in the appt. at 6:00 (because people get drunk and do bad stuff on new years), so we had a little barbeque, and just relaxed/goofed off, and were in bed by 10:30, same as usual.

There has been a lot of snow here lately. They are pretty good about plowing the roads, but getting out of the driveway can be the hardest part. Especially because you have to dig through the wall of snow that the plow forms on the driveway.

[Personal stuff omitted]

Also, i’ll work on an outline of the daily schedule if I have time. This P-day is crazy again because we are going to have a zone activity in Stamford and that tends to eat a lot of time, because Stamford is an hour away. Stamford is a cool town. So, is Scarsdale. Greenwich is rich beyond belief. New Canaan is up there too. There is a highway that connects them, the Merrit Parkway, that turns into the Hutchinson River Parkway (the Hutch, as they say), which connects all these towns. It is the straight shot to the city from all these rich cities.

Alright, well I better go. I really love this work. It is a lot of fun, and very rewarding. The challenges have been interesting…some expected, some not. But I know I’m on the right side of things. I love it.

Thanks for everything. Please take care. Say hi to everyone for me.

I love you all very much!

Love,
Elder Stephen J. Barr