One thing you may not know about our Storehouse is that because of the wide geographic area that we serve, we assemble about 70% of our orders and ship them out by truck to be picked up by the patrons at a chapel closer to their homes.

The other day I was tabulating some information for the change we are contemplating and I came across a peculiar entry.  Why, I thought, would a household of two people want 10 adult toothbrushes?  I looked over the order and noticed that it was written up by the same person who had, a couple of weeks previously, filled in 10 pounds of tomatoes when she really meant to put 10 pounds of potatoes.  Now our volunteers are taught to fill orders as written because we are not judge what others may need.  If it had been one of us in the office, we might have questioned it but this faithful volunteer filled the order just as the form was written.

I went back to the 10 toothbrushes order space.  Sure enough.  Right beside the toothbrush space was the space for toilet paper.  I stopped for a moment and then laughed and laughed.  I thought how horrified the unfortunate people would be to be expecting to get 10 rolls of toilet paper and instead getting 10 toothbrushes.  Now you know why I was the RS class clown.  It's worth a winter laugh.

In winter the roads here are white.  This is because of the salt they use to melt ice.  It’s not always cold enough to use gravel on the roads like they do in Alberta.  Drivers here are impatient and consequently rude.  They will honk for any and every reason; if you don’t put your foot on the gas the second the light goes green or, if you’re moving, if you even take your foot off the gas, they might honk at you.  They think that the safe distance you leave between cars is a space to be moved into.

We had some perfect Alberta weather days such as I love a couple of weeks ago – crisp and cold (but not arctic) and brilliantly sunny.  Often the skies here are a dull blanket of grey, grey and grey.  Even in the summer.

I am at last done my wildfire afghan for my yellow, yellow and yellow living room.  As I have been cold for the first time in about eight years, I may be in great need of it.  I have also been crocheting roses.  Our oldest daughter, who is getting married in July, is as deeply into crochet as I am.  She does craft shows and does them very successfully but she prefers to do larger crocheted objects.  So I am crocheting roses to make her wedding bouquet.  Besides the obvious greenery she will add, she is also going to weave in some purple coloured yarn which will coordinate with the bridesmaids’ dresses.  These are the roses posing against the afghan.

The Storehouse is open until noon Saturdays.  A couple of weeks ago at about 11:30 we got a phone call from someone asking for directions.  Paul tried to help him figure out where to go.  At 5 to 12, he called again, still lost, and this time Paul figured out that the reason he was lost was that he was in Markham instead of Etobicoke.  This is not as unlikely as it sounds.  It seems like every town in Ontario has the same street names so it’s easy to get in the wrong place.  We said we would wait for him but by a quarter to one, I was starting to wonder if he was going to get there at all.  He walked in at 5 to.  He explained that his phone, which had been his GPS, had died unexpectedly on him (when do people count on their phones dying?).  He had had no idea where he was going, had never been to the storehouse before and he had only arrived at the right place at all, he said, because he had prayed.   He exclaimed it over and over, he was so impressed that his prayer had been answered so quickly once he had voiced it.

Well, at last the Storehouse has been open and we’ve been able to get some hands-on experience.
 

It needs just a bit of refurbishment so I have been trying out some change on the shelves.  The products are loaded from behind on rolling shelves but so far they’ve been left in their cardboard boxes.  We put things in plastic bins instead.  It took all day to change over just the one section of shelf, with the help of a volunteer.  Now hopefully we can change all the others, too.  We have been buying many of the bins at Canadian Tire (you’d be surprised how many bins those shelves holding going towards the back) and getting many strange looks at buying 90 at once.  Perhaps they think we are survivalists.

BEFORE                                                                                      AFTER                                         

      

This ward that we are attending is very diverse.  That is not at all unusual for this area.  There are many different accents spoken but hopefully everyone in this ward at least, speaks English.   In Sunday School I sat while the gentle sounds of snoring emanated from the person next to me.  But wait – it was a two year old girl.  Our Sunday sacrament meeting themes were forgotten today in a bit of drama.  The last speaker was just winding up his talk.  He was a young man, not long back from his mission.  Suddenly in mid-sentence he dropped forward, hitting his head on the podium and then fell over sideways.  The whole congregation gasped and was instantly attentive if they hadn’t been before.  People rushed forward to see to him and a baby on one side of the chapel began to scream.  I don’t think it was any relation to him but it must have been alarmed at the suddenness of what happened.  9-1-1 was called and everyone hustled off to their classes.  I was glad to see no one tried to have the closing hymn and prayer over top of him.