Face Masks and a Brass Serpent

On July 10, 2020, the Utah Area Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints sent a letter to the members of the church in Utah to wear face coverings while in public. I have been dismayed by the large number of member church members in Utah who have expressed a negative reaction to this request.

The parallels to the brass serpent while the children of Israel were traveling through the wilderness is interesting. (Numbers 21) In the case of the Israelites, the people were dying because they had been bitten by poisonous snakes. Moses made a brass serpent and put it on a pole. All the people had to do to live was to lift up their heads and look at the serpent on the pole. We read in 1 Nephi 17:41 that many perished because they were so hard-hearted they would not do this simple thing.

I worry that some in our community may be so emotionally wrapped up in what has come to be a political statement about wearing or not wearing face coverings that they fail to follow the counsel of our church leaders. It will be sad  if this attitude increases the number of otherwise preventable deaths.

Yesterday was an interesting General Conference Day for me.

Solemn Assembly

The day started with a solemn assembly and a chance to sustain the new prophet, Pres. Nelson, his counselors, and two new apostles. I enjoyed the opportunity to feel the Spirit as the brethren were sustained and I had a chance to participate. Some people don't understand and equate this with voting. That's not really the case. The Lord has already cast the definitive vote and chosen his servants. What it represents to me is a chance to feel a witness of their call and covenant that I will continue to sustain the Lord's anointed.

There was also a change in the General Young Women's Presidency and the General Primary Presidency. I don't have much association with them right now, so that wasn't as meaningful for me.

Elder Gong

One notable occurrence was Elder Gerrit Gong's call as a new Apostle. I knew Elder Gong when he was an honors student at BYU with me. We later renewed our acquaintance when he returned to BYU as a faculty member and administrator. I've always found him to be very thoughtful, someone who asks good penetrating questions, and someone who shows a lot of love and respect for those around him. The church is going to be greatly blessed by his ministry.

The other apostle called was Elder Ulisses Soares, from Brazil. Since Elder Gong is of Chinese ancestry, this is the first time we've had brethren called to the Quorum of the Twelve in this dispensation who had non-European ancestry.

Ward Melchizedek Priesthood Quorums

To top off an already full and interesting day, I attended General Priesthood Meeting with David and Davey Shwalb, my son-in-law and grandson. It's nice to be living close enough to them to have that opportunity. The meeting was mostly devoted to announcing and explaining a change in teh Melchizedek Priesthood quorum structure in the wards. There will not longer be a high priest group in the ward, only an Elder's Quorum where both groups meet together presided over by an Elder's Quorum Presidency. The stake high priest quorum will consist of those who currently have a leadership calling of bishopric, high council, patriarch, or stake presidency.

This is the second time I've had the priesthood group I was in dissolved. I was a Seventy when Seventy's Quorums and groups were dissolved at the stake and ward levels.

The brethren have a vision that this reorganization will facilitate Melchizedek Priesthood bearers to better minister to the saints in their wards. I'm excited to see how it will work out.

I visited the White House this week as part of my NSF orientation. I was hoping the government affiliation would get me a special tour, but is was just the usual one. That said, the usual one is pretty interesting all by itself.

Security

The security was pretty amazing, as you might imagine. I had to go through three security checkpoints with armed secret service police at each one. NSF made a reservation in advance and I had to be on their lists, present a photo ID, and to through a couple of weapons screenings.

Inside

It is set up as an exhibit for tourists to walk through. This is the view looking from inside to the south lawn. There are getting ready for the Easter Egg hunt this weekend. It thought it was funny to see a soccer goal on the lawn.

Photos

They have a lot of pictures of current and past presidents on the walls.
This one was with presidential dogs. They were sure to have Pres. Trump in any of the collages which made sense.

Other Views

This is looking south through the windows towards the Washington Monument. The cherry blossoms were just starting to come out. They will be in full bloom in a week or so.
 
Here is a picture of me standing by a bust of Pres. Lincoln.

This is the red carpet the President uses to walk into Press Conferences.


This is the state dining room. There was a display of china from the different custom sets used for state dinners by Presidents going back at least as far as Lincoln.

T
This is me after I exited the White House. It was kind of interesting that the road in front of the White House along Pennsylvania Avenue isn't paved. Because of security, you can only walk there, not drive.

Nearby Buildings

For some reason, it hadn't occurred to me how close other buildings would be to the White House. The Treasury Building is right across the street. (This made me think of my son, Bob.)

I also saw the headquarters of the American Bar Association, the Library of Congress, national monuments, and lots of lobbying organizations. People don't have to drive far (or at all) to get between these places.

I had a  chance to visit Neil and Sam last month. They were nice enough to drive all the way down to Houston to meet me. I was travelling to Lamar University in Beaumont, TX. It was especially good to see Will, who is growing SO big.
While Neil and Sam were there, we did take-out and played games on Friday night in their hotel room. On Saturday, we drove to the Johnson Space Flight Center, which was cool for me. I hadn't been there before an really enjoyed it.


This is a picture of us standing in line for a ride around the space flight center. It was fun to see the location where so many important things that interest me have happened.

These pictures are by a large rocket outside the big building which housed the rocket that was going to launch a later Apollo mission if it hadn't been scrubbed. The technology is impressive on two accounts. One is for the astronauts who were brave enough to sit in a tiny capsule on top of one of these things. Another is for the amazing engineers who accomplished amazing feats given the technology available to them at the time.

This is climbing up the stairs to see the Space Shuttle Columbia. We could walk all through is as well as in the plane which was used to launch it. The story about the engineer who convinced NASA to launch it from a plane after the challenger disaster was pretty interesting as well.

New Ward

We had a chance to attend church for the first time last week. The ward is quite friendly and made a concerted effort to reach out to us our first week there. Because of the geographical location, it is an interesting mix of younger couples (relatively larger primary) and established couples. The younger couples tend to be somewhat transient. The bishop is relatively young and quite energetic. He seemed nicely goal oriented (perhaps because we were meeting on Dec. 31). Ward and stake goals were driven more be developing Christ-like and Zion characteristics rather than numbers, which I think will be positive. I'm optimistic we'll fit in well.

There are two missionaries assigned to the ward, Sis. Hansen and Sis. Kleven, whom we invited over for dinner on Wednesday. They are both quite pleasant, poised and comfortable talking about the gospel, and carry a great spirit with them. I'll feel comfortable referring friends to learn the gospel from them as we meet new people here.

There doesn't seem to be a ward choir organized here, which I will miss. There seems to be some reasonable musical talent in the ward, so it should be possible to get one going. Perhaps we can be a catalyst for getting one started. It's more challenging to get people to stay for or come to choir practice when the travel distance to church is farther, as it is here. It takes us about 20 minutes to drive to church and would take others somewhat longer.

The church meets in a beautiful location on the banks of the Potomac River. We drive along the George Washington Parkway most of the way to get there. It is pretty now in the winter, but will be prettier still in Spring when the many trees have their leaves back. 

My First Week at NSF

Here is a picture of the building where I work Deon took from our bedroom window at 7:00 in the morning.

The National Science Foundation is the building on the right. You can see parking and a little bit of the tracks for the Eisenhower station of the Metrorail on the lower left. The road on the center left is the belt root we use to get to Allison and Davey's house to to drive into DC.

I spent almost all of my time this week getting settled into the new job. NSF is an interesting mix of academia and government service. The program directors and supervisors I work with all have academic backgrounds, so our conversations tend to be pretty academic, though on the administrative side of academia. The scope is national rather than institutional however, which is more like the conversations I had on AAPT and APS committees:

• What can we do to improve the training of undergraduate STEM students in the United States? 
• What are the big trends in STEM undergraduate education in the US for the next decade?
• How are the national leaders behind various big ideas, and how can we channel NSF resources to help them accomplish their efforts?

The head of the organization is appointed by the President and approved by the Senate. The "board of directors" is the National Science Board, a distinguished group of some of the most prominent science leaders in the U.S.

The government bureaucracy part of the job is evident as well. We had a cold snap and a winter storm this week which caused government offices to delay opening on Thursday by two hours. That decision was made by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM in government alphabet soup talk) rather than by individual agencies (more about that later). I'm used to those kinds of decisions being more local.

The staff employees are the bureaucratic government part of the organization. I've found them to be friendly, competent, and helpful. They are used to working within well-defined parameters of government regulations and procedures, but capable of recognizing how to work within those parameters to accomplish what needs to be done.

There is less grousing about the complications in our operations occasioned by the shifting sands of congressional and executive branch whims than I imagined. It's frustrating to not always have control over a long term direction in funding and operational priorities, but people seem to adapt to that pretty well in order to move forward with a defined mission we're all passionate about. There are frequent and healthy internal discussions about how we can do our jobs more efficiently, more effectively, and in ways to have the biggest impact on national science.

Given the many government regulations and policies, I've found that things which were relatively simple at BYU, like getting an office or a computer, are more complicated here. I spent more of this week getting a computer with appropriate access to the internal network, getting a badge (security is a much bigger deal than at BYU), an filling out various orientation forms and reports. I'm learning that it is helpful to be able to figure out which office has people with which expertise. Hopefully I'll be more established next week and have a more permanent office, a telephone, and the like.

I'm also having to learn to be careful about communications I have with people outside NSF. Since I have a ".nsf.gov" email address the emails are public and my communications an be considered as an official government statement. In some ways its similar to situations at BYU, where I needed to make clear that my opinions were my own and didn't represent an official opinion of BYU usually.

A Cold Snap

The geographical perspective on weather was interesting this week as the East Coast got hit with a blast of cold and a winter storm. The temperatures have been in the teens or lower at the coldest times and got below zero with the wind chill. It seems colder than the coldest days I remember in the Provo because of the higher humidity. On the other hand, the amount of actual snow, as you'll not in the picture above, is pretty small compared to big storms we've had in Utah. However, because the weather was unusually cold for Virginia and they don't often have even this much snow, it resulted in school being cancelled and government offices delaying their opening times. It caught me a bit by surprize. I didn't even think to check the radio to see if there would be any changes in operating times, because the weather didn't seem that severe to me. (Of course, I only needed to walk half a block to get to work.) When I arrived at NSF, the only other people there were the three people from Minnesota who were accustomed to working in much more severe winter conditions.

Allison's Race

The cold didn't stop our daughter, Allison, from running a 5k on Jan. 1. We were pleased to be able to see her. She took first place in the women and had a very good time considering the weather.

Allison near the start of her run.

Still looking good near the end of the run.

Allison getting her award is first-place woman finisher.

Allison was excited that they let her break the tape when she finished. She seems confident about running the Boston Marathon this spring.

Bob's and Carole's Visit

A nice thing about living in the DC area is that is a central location a lot of people visit. Deon will be babysitting for our daughter, Carole, this weekend while she is here attending a conference. Bob had an unexpected stop in DC because of weather related delays in a trip to a conference in Philadelphia this week. It was fun to see him at Allison's and Davey's house.

Trip to Alexandria, Virginia

We just drove from Provo, Utah to Alexandria, Virginia where I will be temporarily working at the National Science Foundation as a program officer. Allison and Davey, which help from their siblings set up our apartment for us before we arrived. It was so nice it was to be able to move into an already set-up apartment after a long and sometimes difficult drive from Utah to here. We’re excited to be closer and Allison’s and Patrick’s families for a while, even though it puts us further away from the California and Utah families. I’ve attached some pictures of the new apartment. We have a nice view of the National Science Foundation on one side (a very short walk) and to the South on the other side. We’re on the 15^th floor, so the view is pretty good. We’re excited to get settled and explore everything.

Our trip here was thankfully pretty uneventful. We took off from Provo right after my last final was over on Wednesday at 10:00 AM and drove to Sidney Nebraska. Our Fusion was packed about as full as we could manage. It is a pretty peppy car, so we didn’t notice the extra weight much when we were driving.

On Thursday the drive was more challenging, especially in the morning. We drove into some freezing rain. There was a constant drizzle which froze on the road and windshield on contact. It was cold enough that we couldn’t keep the windshield clear, even with the defroster on full blast. We thought the problem might have been old wiper blades, so we stopped and changed them. The new ones were better, but the windshield still required us to stop occasionally and scrape it. The road was also very slick. We were limited to 30 MPH in some sections. We probably saw about a dozen vehicles who had slide off the road. One of them was trying to pass us when they lost control and were fishtailing back and forth across their lane. We were worried they were going to push us off the road when their car got within a few inches of ours. After that, they spun across the median and across the lanes of opposing traffic. We hope they were okay. We couldn’t follow them as we were intent on keeping our own car under control.

On Friday, we took a chance to stop by and see Aunt Joan while we were in Indiana. It was great to have lunch with her and get caught up on her missionary endeavors. It added another two hours to the trip that day, so we arrived quite late in Somerset, PA, but it was worth it.

Dining Room with View to the South

Couch, computer desk, and bar stools

Nice Welcome Basket from Family

Kitchen with Bar Stools

Bathroom with Washer and Drier

Family History

I am attending RootsTech this week, a huge genealogy conference in Salt Lake. While I am admiring the many high tech tools that make things so much easier these days I have been thinking about the debt I owe to others who started this work before me. I remember my Grandma Johnson with her many paper files and large wide carriage manual typwriter. I appreciatey great grandpa Turley writing his life story on 90 pages of longhand writing. How lucky I am to have both current advantages and a great heritage.