Latter-day Village Square

Courtney White’s newest LDS YW Lesson Handouts are now available!  This set is for the YW 3 Manual, lessons 13-24.  The photography, as always is stunning and powerful.  Someone was asking for them because they will be teaching these lessons soon, and I realized that the YW manuals do not require leaders to teach the lessons in order.  They have leeway to select lessons they feel their young women need most at the time.  Courtney had the material ready, but there is a lot of preparation involved to make it ready for the web and for downloading.  I hurried and got that done and now they are in the store!

All the lessons and handouts are wonderful, but lesson 23 had a lot of posters with wonderful counsel from President Benson about overcoming discouragement, and I decided to try something new.  I went through the lesson and put together a PowerPoint Presentation, including the images Courtney prepared, all the scripture quotes, questions to ponder from the lesson, and some extra images of church leaders who are quoted and stories that are included in the lesson.  Then I picked out some music from the church music website to go along with the slides.  This presentation is included in the product!  Even if you do not own PowerPoint, you can view the presentation with the free PowerPoint Viewer available from microsoft.com.

I serve in the nursery, and sometimes I have many big pictures to show during the lesson.  So I started putting them in a Powerpoint presentation, adding music and so forth and bringing my laptop to church with me to show during our lesson.  The little children loved it!  I am sure your young women will also enjoy a change of pace!  You can either just show it on your own computer, as I did, or burn it to a CD and show it using the DVD player from the library.

But don’t feel bad if you don’t have or want to show a PowerPoint Presentation!  The posters are all included to be printed out, and I also included card size posters you can print out for each girl, and a lovely little mini-folder with pockets that you can put the mini-posters in to give to each girl.

~Debra

We have a new friend in our Club! Bunster Bunny! The February Seasonal Collection in the Village Download Depot Club is all about Bunster! Illustrated by Dustin Pike, Bunster comes hopping right off the screen with his adorable cuddli-ness. Dustin has been creating these delightful whimsical clip-art characters for many years, and we are excited to introduce some new pals here at LDV.

I had a lot of fun designing some special projects and scrapbook papers and borders for this collection. The artwork is so cute and colorful, I found I couldn’t sleep at night just itching to hit my computer and photos-hop Bunster into action. I admit - I came up with the name Bunster. Along with his feminine counterpart - Bet.

Last Thursday I had some time on my hands while waiting for my husband to have some medical work done, which required me to be the driver. So I moseyed on over to Foothill Village near the VA Hospital in Salt Lake City. There is an educational toy store there - I love those places! It made me want to be a kid all over again. They had some fun little activity books, and I picked one up as inspiration for doing a Bunster Bunny Activity Book. That is one of the best things about this collection. Dustin sent me line art drawings that are perfect for coloring pages and activity books so the kids can do the coloring themselves!

This is a great collection for teachers, parents and grandparents - as well as anyone who enjoys whimsical art!

~Debra

The day after I learned that President Hinckley had died, I wrote to Scott Jarrard to request that he do a new coloring page for Thomas S. Monson.  Scott has illustrated our Prophets of the Restoration FHE/Activity Book with fabulous coloring pages for each prophet.  Scott had already thought of it!  He got busy researching for a story - and has drawn a beautiful coloring page to a classic Thomas S. Monson story - it has been added to our Prophets of the Restoration Activity Book, available for instant download in our store.

I also created a page for additional information about Thomas S. Monson for the book.  In looking for articles about and by him, again and again I noted that a strong theme of love, charity and service ran through his life and work.  I have linked to many online resources about President Monson, including his own website.

It will be a wonderful experience getting to know him better, as we always do, when there is a new prophet.

~Debra

We’ve just added a new department in our store - Serene Books - Beautifully handcrafted handbound books by Serene Heiner. To start off, Serene has designed several LDS themed books that are now in our store:

• I Am a Child of God
• CTR
• I Love to See the Temple
• Young Women Values

Serene fell in love with book binding after taking the book binding class at BYU while she was working on her graphic design degree. She so excelled that she was invited to teach the course a couple of times since she graduated. My son said he had wanted to take that class - it was a very popular class at BYU and very hard to get a spot in. I attended one of Serene’s classes as her guest one evening - they were doing paste paper that night, a paper decorating technique I had never done before. It was so fun!

Serene has mastered a number of book binding techniques and will continue to add new products, including book binding kits and instructions - as time goes by.

Serene makes custom books for weddings, newborns, missionaries by commission, along with her beautiful hand drawn portraits. Visit her bio page for more information.

With new resources for LDS Relief Society at LDV, and plans for a lot more, we decided to create a free Relief Society Membership at LDV to keep RS sisters informed of what is available for them, as well as gather new material “from the field” to share.

We’ve added a Relief Society menu item to our horizontal drop down/fly out menus that appear on nearly every page of LDV. The Relief Society home page explains more about what RS is and LDV RS resources.

Membership is FREE! If you are new to LDV - join the RS Membership here . If you are already a member, add the RS Membership on your membership page.

Right now, we have a little gift - a lovely February Visiting Teaching Bookmark pdf file - for those who join and answer a few questions:

• What is your RS calling?
• What enrichment groups do you have in your ward/branch?
• What RS resources are you looking for online?

Please send your answers directly to me at debra@latter-dayvillage.com

You can always use our submission form to submit your RS ideas to be added to the Free Sampler.

~Debra

We have just launched a new subscription product that I am really excited about. Donna McAllister of Belle Vista, California is writing LDS Sunday School Lesson Plans based on the Gospel Doctrine manual for this year - The Book of Mormon.

What is significant about Donna’s plans is that she has geared them for the youth Sunday School courses - 14-17. These youth classes use the same lesson manual that is used for adult Gospel Doctrine lessons, and there is no additional material to help focus the lessons on the youth. I have to admit, I was unaware of this situation. I have never taught youth Sunday School classes, and assumed there was a set of youth SS manuals! Or if the same manuals were used, there would be suggestions for ways to present the material to youth. That isn’t the case.

Donna recognized this problem years ago when she was called to teach youth SS. So she has been preparing new plans for youth based on the adult lessons - and now she is sharing her work with us - and with you! The response so far has been very positive! One teacher wrote in:

I am a Sunday school teacher and am absolutely thrilled about “Donna’s Lesson plans” I used the sample lesson in my class today and it was perfect.

Another user wrote in:

I wanted to THANK [Donna] for sharing the SS lesson plans. My husband started teaching the youth ages 13-17 back in the summer. He tells me almost every week how difficult it is to put the lesson on a youths level, especially now that the course of study is the Book of Mormon. He says he knows it’s sometimes above their heads, but he has a good group.

Tonight I showed him Donna’s lesson help and he loved it. Men don’t always think about word strips and posters of the quotes. He was excited to know that he’s a step ahead with Donna’s lesson.

Donna includes a very detailed lesson plan, and the visuals, posters, word strips, puzzles, handouts, supplemental articles from the New Era, etc that fit into the lesson. It is great to have all of this at your fingertips, ready to go to present a lesson to our youth each week.

You can find Donna’s Lesson Plans at http://latter-dayvillage.com/pages/ss/gdbm1.html

We’ve added a new Sunday School Menu item from our horizontal menu bar that appears on almost every page of LDV. And we’ve also added additional Sunday School resources to our Free Sampler. http://latter-dayvillage.com/sampler/category.php?id=119

The Sr. Primary, Youth Sunday School, and adult Sunday School classes are correlated so families should be studying the same basic material in their various classes each week - but without a doubt, the material needs to be presented at the level of the class - and so we are excited to offer this great tool for helping our youth SS teachers do that.

~Debra

I had the server maintenance all worked out for very early this morning. Our data center staff was going to install a secondary hard drive in our server to give us more backup room. We are selling so many digital downloads that the hard drive space required for the site on the web server has grown exponentially. We now have over 10GB of files in Latter-dayvillage.com alone. All of the sites running on our server, e.g. our personal sites and some others we host, are backed up nightly to a separate location on the hard drive. From there, they are backed up to a secure disk storage array in the data center. But those 10GB of files are so much larger than we ever anticipated, that we decided to install a secondary hard drive just for backup.

After the data center staff installed the new hard drive, they started up the server again, around 3 am Mountain Time this morning, but did not check to see if the web services were running, only if the box could be pinged and accessed via secure shell. Later this afternoon, I pointed out to the tech I was chatting with that the box was a web server, how could they do maintenance and not ensure that it fulfilled its main purpose? I have not received an answer for that one yet. This is the first time our data center staff has really let us down; however, the problem would not have been as bad had I checked everything earlier.

Why didn’t I check the server earlier this morning? Well I had my own problems where at home. I live in lovely wind-swept Wyoming. We had another cold snap last night, the wind chill was down to -13 and our building pipes froze again for the second time this winter. I heard water running hard at from somewhere outside out apartment at 7:45am. We had very low water pressure and water was coming into our kitchen (we live on the ground floor right next to the utilities closet. It also came into the room where I have all of my computer gear, soaking the carpets and making a general mess of things. At 4:30pm now we still have no water.

So I must admit I was not even thinking about the server. Finally someone sent me a text message asking if the site was down, when I discovered the problem.

I certainly apologize for any inconvenience the outage caused. It is not something we planned or could even imagine. Now where is the bottled water we stored…

You may have noticed a slight change in the site design. Last night and early today I implemented a change in the menu system that displays our main top drop down (horizontal is the correct term) menus.  I first developed the menus using a JavaScript-based software component that plugged into our Adobe Dreamweaver development environment.  Then we upgraded to Adobe’s CS3 development system, which includes a very similar menu system called Spry.  I started to look at the differences between the two systems, finally determining that the Spry system would speed up our page load times, meaning our pages would be more responsive.  Spry also does not use an image background, meaning few graphic files have to be loaded, adding to its speed and responsiveness. Now our top banner is the same brown color as the rest of our boxes and such.  Finally, I felt more confident that the Spry menus would solve some of our compatibility problems:

• Menus looked and operated differently with our knowledgebase software.
• I had to do some kludgy patching of our blog software to get the old menus to even work and they still looked out of sorts with the rest of the presentation.

The SPRY menus seemed to solve all of that, at least in the test pages I did.

Well let me tell you, I should have tested more.  Updating the site menus means that I must cut/paste our page header (the logo, building images, and menus at the top, including any left side navigation or right-side advertisement areas) and the page footer (banner ads, Google tracking code, and bottom of the page links) into ten different software components:

1. Support Desk
2. Support Knowledgebase (Kb)
3. Forums / image gallery (they share the same theme code)
4. aMember (our membership management system)
5. Sampler Kb
6. Primary Music Kb
7. Primary Kb
8. Seminary Kb
9. Shopping Cart
10. Other static pages, like our home page.

Of course I usually get half way through the list and run into a problem. Last night was no different.  The new menu JavaScript code did not want to play nicely with the Smarty template system used by our Kb software. So that meant that four different parts were all broken. Fortunately, the Smarty system is open source software, which in many cases means better support and documentation than purchased software. This is not always the case, but a widely used system like Smarty had more than enough information; I found a solution and soon had the menus NOT blowing up the Kb software.

Finally, may I please tell you how much I HATE Internet Explorer (IE). More hacks and workarounds have to be used simply because Microsoft makes its own standards, expecting everyone else to just march along behind them. Our new menus looked dreadful when viewed with Internet Explorer.  I normally use Firefox, which is more secure, more feature-rich, extensible, and faster.  I only use IE to test login problems.  However, this time I didn’t test the menus in IE very well. They looked DREADFUL, like something hacked together by an amateur like me.  Again, back to the Dreamweaver Spry support systems, where I found only a single reference to the blotchy and misaligned display I was seeing.  A Spry update was suggested.

After I installed the update and compared the new Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) file with the old one, I was able to experiment with some of their updated CSS adjustments and get the menus to work equally as well in Firefox and IE.  Yeah!  Finally success, but achieved at the cost of sleep deprivation.  Sometimes with my head down I can work a problem for hours and lose track of time.  So sometime after my wife and son left for work, I finally felt the site was stable enough that I could nap.

So, there you have it; a day in the life, or since I work mostly the graveyard shift, should I say, night in the life of a web developer. Now where’s my pillow?

My husband and I have been serving in the nursery for over a year now.  I think I really learn more than the children do.  I could probably write a book about it, and maybe someday I will -  but today I wanted to share something that occurred and what it taught me.

On January 6th, three of our older nursery children became Sunbeams, leaving only 4 little ones in the nursery with us.  That very first week, and every week since then, I have noticed just how much these younger children have become so much more talkative and expressive since the migration of the older children into Sunbeams.  Now, I do not for a moment believe that somehow the children’s communication skills magically improved over the New Year’s holiday.  Clearly, the little ones had been out communicated by the older children.  They had simply deferred to the older children - allowing them to lead and answer the questions, and take the focus in class.  That isn’t surprising, but it was such a marked change from one week to the next, that it was striking.  And so these little ones are stepping up to bat and having an opportunity for leadership.  Already we see it - they automatically know that they are the ones to comfort the littlest newcomer when she is bewildered by the nursery goings on.  It is really quite amazing to me.  Children who were nearly silent are Chatty Cathy’s now.  I had even wondered about some of them, thinking they may be slower in developing their speaking skills.  This was simply not the case.  We had some very outspoken demanding children move up - and when they did, the little ones now have a chance to shine!

I can’t help but wonder about my early experience in life.  Somewhere along the line, I went from being the youngest in my family where I knew everyone was smarter, and bigger and faster and more experienced than me, to a classroom full of peers, and over the next couple years, I realized that I was a leader of sorts.  By the age of eight I know I thought of myself that way.  I distinctly remember thinking that if the teacher was explaining something and someone else wasn’t “getting it,” I took it upon myself to raise my hand and ask, in their behalf really, for a clearer explanation, or I would say something like “you mean . . . ” and clarify what was not so clear to others.  Now I am 49, and I still do that.  Anyway - in high school I came to the realization that my willingness to answer questions and to ask questions didn’t always serve my classmates all that well.  They got used to me answering questions and just stopped bothering to raise their hands.  I hate that pregnant pause in class, at school or at church, in any setting - when no one wants to be the one to answer, for whatever reasons.  But I have learned to be more patient - so others will share too.

Now for the thing that just occurred to me.  I thought how the president of the church is the pre-eminent focus of all members and all the rest of the world.  The buck stops with the president.  That is how it is in most organizations.  And being in that position is completely and utterly different from any prior experience as an assistant, advisor, counselor, vice-president, committee chairman, or member.  There is something so weighty about being the final word.  And when you put on that hat, or mantel, it changes you.  In the church, when you are set apart in that calling, as with any calling, you are given the keys to administer in that calling - all you need to do your job - it is a remarkable blessing.

Upon the death or graduation or retirement, or simply the end of the term of one president, a new person takes on that role - and whatever they have done in the past, they have a new experience ahead of them in their new role - but the exit of their predecessor makes a space for them to grow and expand into.  And just like the little children in the nursery - that space is very important.  That opportunity is very important.  And until it happens, neither they nor anyone else watching may recognize what they are capable of.

Now, a new president and prophet will be stepping into the role as God’s key representative to the world on the earth.  I have zero doubt about what the Lord has been doing for his entire life - preparing him for this new role.  But until he takes up that torch, he will not really know what he is capable of, nor will we - and it will be amazing, as it always is, to discover with him how the Master has molded and shaped him for such a time as this.

I hated being left behind when the older kids flew the coop.  My oldest sister, Judy, was like a second mother to me.  She was nine years older than me and I adored her.  I remember each year during the Miss America pageant, I wondered what had gone wrong!  I had it in my head that a committee of judges went around the country finding out who the most beautiful, smart, talented girls were, and they were the ones in the contest . . . so I just couldn’t understand how they had overlooked my sister Judy!  In my mind there was no question at all that she was that girl.  Honestly - all the years I was growing up, that is what I thought.  So when Judy went off to college, I went into mourning.  That was the first in a long series of such experiences of being left behind, and I don’t like it any more now than I did that first time.

When my mom died, it was a very cold January day here in Utah.  My youngest son was living in Richland, Washington, and he had to ride a bus to attend the funeral.  I picked him up at the bus station - temporary bus station because it was just before the Winter Olympics and the bus station was moved way out west of the city - in the wee hours of the morning.  It was so cold.  I had been carrying the weight of caring for my mother as she was dying, and planning the funeral and seeing to many other matters - and in that cold darkness waiting for my son’s bus to arrive, I felt so alone.  I said to Mom - “Why did you leave me!?!  I am not ready for this!”  But I knew . . . she was ready to go.  She had lived a good long life and had deteriorated a great deal in the prior few years - both physically, mentally and emotionally.   A hurricane had blown away her town almost 10 years before, and 9-11 was completely bewildering to her a few months before.  She had given up worrying, or even wondering what the world was coming to - she just wanted to be free of it.  She had had her turn - she had buried her two parents and her in-laws and her husband.  She had been the one to carry on after they left.  She had been so alone, many’s the time in her life.  And as I acknowledged that, I stopped begrudging her the release she was now enjoying.

I guess President Hinckley’s maxim that everything would be all right came from 97 years of watching that happen over and over and over again.  How many crisis did he witness come and go?  How many beloved leaders and family members had left him behind to carry on without them?  And somehow or other, things did work out.  He’d watched it enough to see how doors closing in our faces allowed us to notice the open windows we had ignored, and to come to expect that they would always be there.  And in faith, he also knew that the fulfillment of prophecy is assured, and an ultimately glorious future lies ahead.  The only question being - what must I do today to make it happen?  How am I supposed to contribute to achieving that glorious end?  What lies within my power to accomplish?  And he went about doing just that his entire life, always expanding beyond his comfort zones, beyond what was the accepted standard before, for treading water is not what this gospel is about - it is a stone, cut without hands out of a mountain, rolling forth to fill the earth - and there is no standing still involved.  And then, reflecting on how each step along the way was purposeful and really did contribute to that movement down the mountainside - he courageously looked ahead to the next task at hand.

I loved President Monson’s report of how just days prior to his death, President Hinckley was actively engaged in the work.  And then he was done, and was released and in short order, long enough for his family to bid him goodbye, he made his exit, as he desired and had requested.

And in the huge space he has left, we have a chance to grow up.  Just like the little nursery children.

~Debra