2 October 2017 - Week 26

Every week seems to begin the same way.  A walk in the forest. I'm trying to perfect my selfie skills.

The temperatures here are slowly becoming low enough to turn the leaves yellow, but we have not seen lots of red or leaves on the ground. 

We usually pull off the road at this little pull-out picnic area and walk south along the road. 

Here is a little bunch of "Virginia Creeper" that is showing some red. 

Every morning we walk we see the woodcutters.   They have the best old tractors.  You can see the bucket that they put under the big logs and pull them out to the road where they can pick them up.

The woodcutters have a trailer parked alongside the road they can use for a warming hut or breakroom.  It has a stove in it as you can see by the smoke coming out of the pipe. 

One day as we were returning from our walk we saw this very inventive garden tiller wagon set up.  We are always amazed at the ingenuity of these people when it comes to transportation of both people and cargo. 

We made some jelly from the grapes Sora Muscan gave us (those pictures are on last weeks blog).  The first batch did not set up, but we cooked it a second time and added more pectin.  Now we have some delicious spread for our toast. We put the jelly in some of the extra drinking glasses we had because we did not have jelly jars.  The frosty glasses are because we are storing the jelly in the refrigerator.  We don't have any lids. 

It was my birthday on Saturday, so Brent visited the flower shop where we usually buy the flowers we take to church on Sunday.  They were very beautiful.  

We spent most of the day on Saturday and Sunday listening to conference.  We had a Romanian feed from the District in Oradea with the Romanian translation.  The picture on the feed was pretty pixelated, but the Romanians appreciated having conference in their language.  We were able to watch some in English.  

Brent made the most of an awkward moment and turned a bad situation into an opportunity to place a Book of Mormon. Our neighbor who lives directly below us, came to our door in a rage over the dust Brent was stirring up as he cleaned off our little patio.  Even more frustrating to the neighbor was that we spoke neither Russian or Romanian, so it was hard for him to express his anger.  His hands were trembling as he spoke and he pounded his fist to show what he wanted to do.  He tried to explain to us that he was a Dr. and told us to look at YouTube.   He has videos there that explain that he is a faith healer.  Here is a link to one of them   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I22gCdBWaxo&t=187s

Brent told him "Oh, we do that too!" Brent offered the neighbor the Book of Mormon, which he took. He left our apartment after shaking hands and saying, "Friends" .   Only a few minutes later he was back at our door, asking Brent to write his name and contact information inside the book.  Maybe he will be back another day with questions about the book ......Toate cele bune!

Dr. Vitali Ceban.  Our neighbor.