Monday, July 10, 2017 – Rain, Richard Hancock, Wm Weeks, Visitor’s Center, Sarasota Florida Youth Conference, Tornado Warning

We had another morning rain storm before work but this time it stayed windy and cloudy for a perfect day to work outdoors weeding and cleaning flower beds. Our boss, Richard Hancock has returned from his two week vacation to Idaho and was back on the job today. I think he needs another two week vacation to recuperate from the two week vacation.

We started at the historic home of William Weeks cleaning the last of the weeds from the west side of the house. There weren’t a lot but now the house looks much better, clean all around.

We worked at the Visitor’s Center the rest of the morning. The islands in the parking lot had a whole new crop of weeds for us to pull. The big terracotta planters on the Islands really look nice and full with their flowers all in bloom. Now that the weeks are gone they look that much better.

We also worked several hours in the flowerbeds of the Visitor’s Center. I am always amazed how much faster weeds grow than flowers. We weeded all of the flowerbeds a couple of weeks ago but today the tiny weeds we must have missed last time were two and three feet tall. And there were a lot of them to pull.

At 8:30am we had a Stake Youth Conference from Sarasota Florida arrive to do a service project here at the Visitor’s Center. Richard had them pulling weeds and rogue trees for an hour and a half. They were great, hard working and thorough.  When they finished our trailer was full and all of the Liriope beds on the southwest corner of the Visitor’s center lot were completely finished. It would have taken Elder Kyle Johnson, Elder Cantwell and I days to have done all they work they did. They were great.

 

This evening between 7 and 9pm a very strong thunder, lightning and rain storm rolled through Nauvoo. At one point the trees outside our front door were being whipped around so violently I thought some of them would be ripped out of the ground. Just about then Elder Kyle Johnson, who only lives 200 yards to the south of us, called to let us know that the National Weather Service had issued a “Tornado Warning” for Nauvoo for the next hour.  Fortunately there was no imminent danger of a tornado, if there had been the city’s tornado sirens would have gone off and we are close enough to the tower we would have heard it. But it was kind of scary there for a while.