NHMU and SGO

The roof is copper sheet mosaic donated by Kennecott, now Rio Tinto.

This morning I was at my training at the new Natural History Museum of Utah, NHMU.  The focus this morning was on the Lake gallery.  The floor of the gallery is a terracotta design of the historic boundaries of Lake Bonneville to the present.  The west boundary comes up to the edges and view/access into the paleo gallery with various dinosaurs, mammoths, bear, bison, etc. that would have inhabited the shores in the early last glacial pleistocene era, 12000 years ago.  Then to the NW there is a window looking out to the current Great Salt Lake in the distance.

The floor design shows the four major level boundaries of Lake Bonneville overtime.  The various exhibits demonstrate the land, water, wildlife of the lake reflecting the interdisciplinary focus of  the museum.  Overhead are life-size flocks of tundra swans, pelicans and avocets heading west.  One of the exhibits is an interesting water table that shows Lake Bonneville over the terrain of today.  By turning a wheel the water rains down from a "cloud" over the mountains and the lake boundaries expand as the water runs down the mountains over the valley to the Great Salt Lake.

Our Life and Lake team of about 14 gallery  interpreters are interesting and bright people.  Everyone seems to have something to contribute and to learn from.  Some are university students, 40-50ish and retirees.

After the 3-hour session I walked a ways on the newly re-opened Lake Bonneville Trail that will extend 280 miles, from  the north to Nephi in the south to take a look at the area that will be developed in the east foothills behind the museum for trails next spring/summer.

As with the interior exhibits there is much openness that gives a sense of respect and privilege of use by visitors and passers-by.  These terraces are open to trail users, hikers and bikers to take a break without having to pay admission.

This gives an idea of the view of Great Salt Lake beyond the city from the window in the Lake Gallery. 

Sharing the Gospel Online (SGO)
Today I finally finished my first 20-hour mission week which has been my goal.  Each week I've done a few more hours.  Tonight I reached 20.5.  In the next couple of days I should finish registering all the international temples for googleplaces listings. Some have been very challenging taking almost an hour.  Most take about 15 minutes.  I think when I finish I will have worked about 100 hours on the project. 

Some of the google map locations were way off, which I can now readily appreciate.  Chinese and Japanese characters were challenging to make sure I had made the correct choices for place names from character-only drop down menus.  I have about 14 more to do including Seoul and Kyiv.  Karen and our Japanese friends were helpful with the characters and verifying the correct videos to attach. 

After I had originally done about 33 temple registrations or about half the international temples we realized we had to migrate them to a different account to be acceptable to google algorithms which change occasionally.  Actually it was a good thing because the second time around the postings are more complete and each temple description will be more optimized.  Now the temple recorders of each temple have been notified to expect an automated call from google to take the next step towards  completing the claiming process. 

It has been interesting to notice the great variation in temple schedules.  Some are open many hours and others are open much fewer hours in a week. One temple doesn't have a regular schedule, apparently appointment only.   Its a wonderful thing that though temple workers may be few and patrons may be relatively small in numbers there is a temple available to most of the membership of the church. 

Its a small contribution but I'm looking forward to googling in a few weeks and finding more interesting descriptions and higher-ranking listings of the temples. 

In doing this mission I often think of placing little treasures in the virtual world for people to find in their real world and perhaps make a difference.  In generations past it was the Italian priest finding a title-less copy of the Book of Mormon, the African finding an LDS tract recognizing truth but unable to connect with it, or John A. Widstoe's mother finding a series of tracts in the mended shoes she picked up over time at the shoemaker's. 



I imagine someone, somewhere in the world at any time of day or night googling, clicking on one of these listings and perhaps opening one of five videos such as these:

I like this interesting one from Kyiv:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WQA2Mc7qqU&feature=relmfu

Its been a good week.  Today our ward had another baptism this afternoon.  Lacie is the neighbor of Linda who was baptized two weeks ago by our Montgomery AL (http://mormon.org/me/3XJ9/) and Compton CA (http://mormon.org/me/59K7/) elders.  Our elders are a couple of young men on mormons.org.  I was surprised when I read their pages and discovered who they are besides our elders.  They have an appointment to teach one of my new neighbors, a referral from her friend.

Thanks for the chili recipe Karen.  I tweaked it a bit and came out pretty good at the chili cook-off this evening.  After adding a couple of bay leaves, a dash of Tabasco, some red pepper flakes I tossed in a "secret ingredient" - an extra large piece of chocolate from Cincinnati's Graeter's Raspberry Chocolate Chip ice cream!  Ha!  It was really, really good.   Not a drop left in the crock.

Hope to see you on Skype for a show and tell.

I'm home most evenings.  Just give me a call and I'll take a break from googleplaces.