This is Ron Richardson--and his new truck! He had surgery on his knee a couple of months ago and is doing quite well with his recovery. December 27th, 2008 we had the privilege of going to the Columbus Ohio Temple with Ron Richardson, his first time, and his wife Pam, who had been to the temple several years ago and has returned after several years. Also attending for the first time was Lori Altvater, next to Sister Owens. She is a convert of one year and is a sweet and loving woman who loves the gospel and has a strong testimony of it. What a blessing it was for us to be able to be in the temple with these great people of Ohio. On the right is our Bishop Converse who has taught Ron and Pam and Lori the lessons preparatory to coming to the temple. Ron and Pam will be back next week to be sealed for time and eternity! We will all be there with them for this occasion.

Elder Owens with Lee King who was baptized in November 2008. Elder Owens had the privilege of confirming him on Sunday in the Delaware Ward. What an awesome member he is and he will be such a strength to his family. These pictures are a little out of order but oh well!! We spent Christmas Day with Bea Zufelt and her family in Chillicothe. Larry and Ann, her dear friends, were with us too and we had a wonderful time and a delicious dinner! Bea's teenagers are really sweet and they are so kind to us!

Here they are spelling O H I O . Can you see it!?? They really enjoyed taking crazy pictures. We found out that most of the Elders do the same thing!

We all went to Red Robin for lunch one day to celebrate Elder Pridgen and Elder Brusch's birthday! They are a great bunch of Elders!

Elder Brusch went home December 20, 2008. We look forward to seeing him again when we are in Salt Lake. He is a very humble missionary and we know he will never quit being a missionary.

Elders Brusch and Titensor presented Elder Owens with this beautiful tie before Elder Titensor got transferred. They really enjoyed Elder Owens and his stories and would come to the office and go to Elder Owens little office and sit and visit. They always had a spiritual story to share with him and Elder Owens loved their visits. Elder Pridgen was there often too so they would have a real story sharing time.
We are here with Elders Titensor and Brusch. They were the Zone Leaders in the area where the Mission Office is located so we got to know them quite well. We had some great lunches with them and enjoyed getting to know them--Elder Titensor is from Texas and his dad played for the Dallas Cowboys years ago and Elder Brusch is from Salt Lake City and lives really close to our daughter, Tammy.

These two Assistants are Elders Pridgen and Yablonovsky and they went home in November 2008. We really enjoyed them and miss them here in Ohio. We loved it when they would stop by around 9 PM for ice cream or come over for dinner. They were great leaders and we really grew to love them!

Sunday, October 12, 2008 we went to church and then down to the hotel to visit with John and Sue Potts and Eddy and Lanny Flake who were here with a tour group. They were touring with Rod Meldrum and visiting places that were possible Book of Mormon sites. Brother Meldrum has done extensive studying with DNA and has a DVD out where he tells about his thoughts and discoveries about Book of Mormon lands being here in Ohio, New York and down to Missouri. We had a wonderful visit with our dear friends from Arizona and had a delicious dinner at the Texas Roadhouse! We then sat in on a discussion about DNA and lots of other evidences of the Book of Mormon in this area. It was so interesting and we are going to have to watch his DVD and learn more. Elder Hartman Rector, Jr. and his wife were also with the group so we were able to meet and visit with him for a few minutes. We loved seeing the Potts and Flakes and felt like we had a taste of home for awhile! It was hard to leave them but we know our place is here and we have a lot here to do yet before we do go home. What do you do when you have great friends in two places and the two places are 2000 miles apart? Well, we got back to our apartment about midnight and then laid awake talking about the blessings we have of having such wonderful friends. It made our halfway mark a very happy time!!

The Fall colors are beginning to get really pretty although we understand they will get even prettier in the next two weeks. So we will have to go take more pictures then! We went out to Delaware to visit some members and took these pictures while we were there. We just couldn't seem to get enough of the beautiful yellows, oranges, bronzes and reds. We could have driven down 20 more roads and not seen enough of the beauty that is here in Ohio right now. In two weeks we will go down to the south part of the mission and visit Bea Zufelt again and she said it would be beautiful by then!

September 24, 2008 was the birthday of Elder Pridgen so we took him, his companion Elder Yablonovsky and the Powell Elders, Titensor and Brusch to Red Robin for lunch. They all love to eat! And the Red Robin is the favorite place! We all had a great time. When we got back to the office they decided to show us how they spell OHIO! See if you can see it!

Sunday, Sept 21, 2008, after attending a baptism at the Powell Ward building for a wonderful lady named Victoria (and I can't spell or say her last name!!) from Tanzania, the assistants came over and we BBQ'd a couple of steaks. We were planning on doing that before they called to see if we would like to go to the baptism, so we decided to share with them later!! Elders Yablonovsky and Pridgeon are great guys and we have come to love them a lot. We also have found out that they can really be hams when they relax!! They drop by often enough that now they say they can just knock and then come in! And they are right! We love having them here in our apartment and especially enjoy the times we sit and talk about the scriptures and have prayer with them. They can be so spiritual and they have really studied and learned of the scriptures. It seems like we get close to these fine young men just before they leave for home and then we spend a week being sad. These two both will go home in November. But we are sure there will be two more that we can grow to love also! By the way, the steaks were delicious and we made potato pearl mashed potatoes, white pepper gravy from a package (which was delicious) and had green beans and green salad to go with the steaks. It was a feast!!! And put together the last minute too! These Elders can really put away the food!

The top two pictures are of the Richardson Family who we have been home teaching. Their granddaughter, Jillian was baptized on Saturday, September 20, 2008. She just turned 8 and lives with her father, Jeremiah, and his parents, Ron and Pam Richardson. Ron and Pam are preparing to go to the temple to be sealed. Jillian has been taking the discussions from Elders Dahl and Miller and was excited to be baptized. The young man in the blue shirt in the third picture down is Cody Campbell and is the son-in-law to Tony and Cathy Toronto whom we also Home Teach. Cody was also baptized Sep. 20th. The other young couple in front is the other daughter of Tony and Cathy and her husband Ryan Mills. We are hoping to see Tony and Cathy get back to the temple soon--they were sealed in 2004 and just need to get things together so they can go again. They are all wonderful people and we are so blessed to get to know them.

Saturday, September 20, 2008 we went to the US Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio. There are over 300 planes in 3 huge buildings and we didn't get to see all of it. We will have to go back another day--go earlier and stay later!! It was an awesome place with lots of history and information. Right down Elder Owens' alley!!!

September 13, 2008 we had a Mexican Fiesta with wonderful mexican food, dancing and lots of fun. The picture of the family is the Jary & Christy Carter family with their son and the triplets. The young girl and baby are Kennedy and Abbi Lister whose Dad, Dano Lister, is our Ward Mission Leader. The couple filling their plates at the food table are the Millers--he is a pilot and so Elder Owens has a lot to talk to Brother Miller about! After dinner and a dancing performance, the Mexican dancers came and got a lot of the members to dance with them. Our own Elder Dahl got pulled out on the dance floor and we think he was having a little too much fun!! It was a great evening and we ate the best mexican food we have had since we came to this great Ohio land!

September 14, 2008 Ohio had the windstorm of a lifetime! Big trees like this were blown down all over the state. Power and phone lines were down too, some as long as a week. We were very blessed--we didn't even have our lights blink. In fact, we didn't know until we went out on Monday of everything that had happened!! We were pretty sheltered in our apartment!

Last weekend was really nice. We made a huge batch of cookies Saturday morning to serve at Zone Conference on Monday. In the afternoon we went to Costco to purchase salad stuff, also for the Zone Conference. The main dish will be pizza and that had already been ordered--so we were ready!! Sunday after church we took Elders Dahl and Miller with us to Randy and Marilyn Clark's home for dinner. We ate out on the patio and it was wonderful. The food was delicious and was topped off with rubarb custard pie and peach pie. She is a great cook. Earl and I were there Friday night for dinner as well and we couldn't tell you which meal was the best! They were both wonderful! And it was so nice to sit outside and enjoy fresh air and beautiful scenery while we ate. We are getting tired of being in our little apartment all the time! The Clark's have a 13 acre place with 6 of it wooded and the rest lawn and house. It would take Randy about 6 hours of hard mowing to get the lawn all finished. Of course, he has a riding mower! Everyone out here has one! It was a great afternoon and the Elders had a good time knocking Buckeyes off the tree and filling their pockets! Doesn't take much to entertain them! After dinner we drove to the rehabilitation home to see Chris for the last time as he is moving up North on Monday, Sept. 1st. The Morelands met us there and we all had a nice visit. Chris is a really nice guy and maybe someday he will discover that the church is just what he needs. We will keep in touch with him.

This weekend our good friends from our ward, Bob and Mary Moreland, took us on a ride to see some Amish Country. We don't know exactly where we were but it was beautiful and we learned so much about this wonderful people. We learned that they only go to church every other week and they hold their meetings in someone's home or barn which is scrubbed and cleaned totally for the occasion. Each family takes at least one turn each year. They are grouped in districts with a Bishop for each district that is chosen by drawing lots. If they want to go to church on the other Sundays, they can attend in another district. There is so much more about their religion that I can't explain it all here. We learned the the children go to school in a one-room school house until the 6th grade only. There are many school houses so that the children are within walking distance to them. They are taught the basics and as you can see the playground is very bare--swings and a teeter-tauter is all. This people are industrious and teach their children to work at an early age. They go everywhere in these buggies--the entire family together. They also don't like to have their pictures taken. Even the dolls the children play with have no faces because they do not believe in having graven images. When a couple is married there are no photographs taken. Families live close together in a little compound of homes, barns and dairy cows! Their main source of income is providing milk for the cheese factories. They have several cheese factories and make every kind of cheese you can imagine! We tried them all as we shopped--they had little pieces cut for sampling! They make fudge out of cheese that is really good too.


In this buggy a woman is driving it. They have been shopping. The buggies parked under the blue barn are in a Wal-Mart parking lot. They have been shopping too!! And Wal-Mart provides a place for them to park the buggy and horse that is protected for the horse. I suppose they also provide someone to come and shovel out the stalls from time to time also! We had a wonderful day with Brother and Sister Moreland. We have decided that we will have to go back and spend another day to learn more about these people. We spoke to several of them and they are very nice. Mary said something to one little girl about the "Wizard of Oz" and the yellow brick road and she had no idea what Mary was talking about! They are so protected with no TV, computer, radio or outside news. What a simple life!! We could incorporate some of that into our lives and make ourselves less busy and cluttered with things that really don't matter and don't help our eternal progression!! Maybe we are TOO BUSY! But we know we have a good life and a great family life that is as important to us and theirs is to them. And we know for a surety where we want to end up--as an eternal family with our Heavenly Father.