With all the hoopla about the virus and the missionaries being stuck in their apts. with little to do, they were told that they could contact home twice a week. With transfers moving this week's P-Day to Thursday, Pres. Savage told them to call home today.

I think Alexander and his companion were a bit bored; he was on the videophone with us for a long time, much of it lacking any real conversation but being taken up with kids making goofy faces. I even switched to cellular signal and took him on a tour of the property, including the new shed that Matthew and Shana put up this week.

Without being able to go to anyone's house -- and being discouraged from going out at all -- opportunities for proselyting are limited, unless they want to start making 100% cold calls to random numbers. The mission has been sending the families frequent updates, and the Savages are doing their best to come up with interesting activities to "keep things fresh for our missionaries, add some variety to their days, and encourage them to be creative in their online missionary efforts." They did allow the districts to get together briefly today to share the sacrament (which I thought was odd, since they canceled regular district meetings, and a companionship could serve themselves the sacrament).

They spoke of the loss of their senior missionaries, and happiness at having received missionaries being sent home from other missions (including 4 back from Mongolia) and 16 new ones coming from the MTC. They say that they need them, but the way things are at the moment, it sounds like they could close 3/4 of the areas and the missionaries would still have plenty of time on their hands. That condition won't last forever, though.

As it is, the elders are making good use of the opportunity to review and clean up the area book (and, I'll bet, sprucing up the living space). As is often the case, there was one particular set of elders that were really poor record keepers. Elders Pangrel & Boling found one past investigator with no info other than a phone#. They called and found that the guy had had all of the lessons but one and was ready for baptism when the missionaries dropped him, and he wanted to know if he could still continue the lessons and be baptized! (Of course, there may be more to the story that he didn't tell them, such as a WoW habit that he needs to overcome, but still, it's an exciting find.)

Transfers will be taking place over the course of a week, instead of everyone involved meeting at the mission home as they usually do. I expect that the game of "musical companions" will be tough to plan, and there will be some elders staying temporarily with others until they get their next companion.