Murray Ceff's Blog

Landed in SLC and Jeff Christensen has picked me up from the airport. This is the Thursday prior to April General Conference  2013 (for my memory as much as anyone else's!) Went home, had some lunch, then Christine (Jeff's wife) drove me in to the Temple and I did the 5pm session. Fantastic, apart from the big fat guy beside me cracking his knuckles, talking to himself, eating lollies and then telling me that one of the actors was his father. I felt like saying 'Pity he didn't teach you to be reverent''. l took the first opportunity when we changed rooms to change seats and sit beside someone else. After the Session I spent sometime across the street in Deseret Book and left there quite happy with myself for not buying anything. Got home, had dinner, chatted, did a workout went to bed. Day Two -  Friday Had a lousy nights sleep so didn't get till up about 8.30am. Jeff had already been up and worked out. He aIso did a couple of hours work through the n

Most of the following I wrote in the present tense while travelling in the US in April. Rather than edit it I have just copied it in here. Currently (4 April 2013) waiting for my flight to SLC to depart. Had a great timehere, staying with the Hatches the first three nights and the last 2 nights with the Spencers. I spent a couple of hours at San Francisco Airport waiting for my connecting  flight through to Phoenix. Had a good flight from San Francisco with a young  athlete from Liberty University sitting beside me. He was with his team at a  track meet at Stanford and on his way home. He also told me he was working as a youth pastor at his local church, so we had quite a good chat. He had become an  admirer of Mitt Romney since he spoke at Liberty during his 2012 Presidential  campaign. I arrived at Phoenix Skyharbour about midnight on Saturday night, very late and very tired. Joe and Brenda were waiting for me at Sky Harbour. The next day being Sunday meant that we were

(Please excuse they varying tenses that may make it difficult to follow this. I wrote while I was travelling and then added some later) It has been an eventful day. Margot and Miriam dropped me at Melbourne Airport at about 9am (30 March 2013) in plenty of time for me to catch my 11.55am flight to LA. l joined the very long queue to check in. While wailing in the queue I heard other people mention something about the flight to LA from Sydney (our first stopover) being cancelled. This, of course, was something that no-one wanted to hear. No airline staff came to tell anyone in the queue that there was anything wrong at all. We didn't exactly know what was happening until we got to the check in counter. The lady at the counter explained that the flight had been cancelled due to mechanical problems with the plane. She explained to me that my flights through to Phoenix had been rebooked, and I would have to stopover on Hawaii for about 6 hours. This would put me at my final destin

I am guessing there will be a few people making similar entries to mine today (Sunday 20th January 2013), with a new stake being organized today for the norther outer suburbs of Melbourne. The creation of this stake (and last week the creation of the Gippsland Stake in the states east) has affected many other wards in the surrounding stakes. Let's backtrack to 1981 when I was baptized in the Geelong Ward (along with my young friend Lisa Wade) on the 8th November. Around that time the Fairfield West Stake was created in Melbourne and I am pretty sure that Ted Anderson was the first president of that stake, and Geelong Ward was a part of it. Prior to that time there was just two stakes in Melbourne - Fairfield and Moorabin. So with the creation of the two new stakes, last weekend and today, there are now eight stakes in Victoria, covering most of the state. I think the only exception would be the branches of the Church to the north, like Wangaratta, Shepparton and Albury, which a