Received Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Another picture of Zak

Look awhile, then read his letter.

Picture and letter are UNrelated

As usual, he starts out with the questions I asked him:

QUESTIONS:

How are the FALL colors?? Take some pictures.

its not that colorful yet. I'll try to be better at taking pictures. I had Elder Beck take one of me giving a Book of Mormon to a life-size cut out or Rob Gronkowski in Dunkin Donuts today. The white handbook says about pday: "look for opportunities during the day to find people to teach", so I was doing my best. He was not very receptive though.

Did you get all those pictures I sent??

yes, I got them a few days ago. It was very exciting. There were lots of pictures, which was great. Kylie's eye looked fantastic. Her room did not, but the before/after shot was amazing. It was fun to see quinn's court of honor too; it was fun to get a letter from "Julie Cole proud mother of 5 eagle scouts". The big winner might be Jayna eating her cake though.

Also I got the Package with the Thor Pez a week or so ago. I liked getting that a lot.

Talk about transfers! Are you moving?

nope I get to stay at least another 6 weeks

New companion? nope, Elder Beck is still here too

New roommates? nope, we were all safe this time. We were all glad. Elder Watson who is in my district and was in my mtc district is leaving out of the zone though, which is kind of lame. Also the Staples (the senior couple here) are leaving really soon.

Can you explain why all the US mission p-days are on Monday, BUT when you have transfer days you change it to Wednesday?

Because transfers are on Saturday so if you are transferred/going home you can pack the day before on p-day.

Any interesting mail/packages this week?

I got the letter from home where you printed out my email and put your comments on it which was really fun to read. I'll answer the questions you wrote on it below. Also I got another letter from someone at BYU which was great and a letter from Sister Sotis in our ward which was neat.

Do you roommates get mail like you...more or less?

I get the most mail, which means you guys win the big prize! keep up the good work! Newer missionaries always get a lot more mail than older ones, but Elder Concha doesn't get much because he's international. Elder Wilding gets a good amount and Elder Beck, our oldest in the apartment gets the least.

What are your plans for general conference...where will you watch?

We will watch all the sessions at the ward building. I think it would kind of silly for us to do anything different. We are all really looking forward to it

Any weather issues?

its getting colder. we wore our sweaters twice this week and now I always wear my long sleeve shirts. It's fine now, but I'm just worried about whats coming. I can't believe how hot it is for you guys, we haven't had an uncomfortably hot day in forever. people keep telling me winter will be tough here.

Things from the letter you sent me:

About singing: I sort of sang to someone this week. There is this guy in the ward, who lives in an assisted living home because he is somewhat mentally handicapped and he likes to have missionaries over, so usually missionaries see him like once or twice a transfer and Elder Beck and I visited him this week and I sang "I Am a Child of God" for him". I asked him if he thought it was good and he said yes and he I got better as my voice warmed up throughout the song

About Elder Concha and English: when he was in high school he went on an exchange program to Utah for 6 months and got fluent then. He also likes to watch Hollywood movies, which are in English (with Portuguese subtitles). Also he learned it in school and listens to music in english. It's just funny the random words/phrases he doesn't know. He didn't know what pez was until I gave him one.

things I want to say before I forget.
I have gotten numerous compliments/comments in letters about you doing a good job keeping my mission blog up. One time we were at a members house for dinner and the daughter in the family was about to leave on a mission and they mentioned her mom was going to make her a blog too and I said that I had one and it works well. The next time we were over she told me she found my blog and skimmed through it, which might be somewhat inappropriate, except now she's in the MTC so it doesn't really matter. (She'll be back home before me though). moral of the story: good job on the blog, even people in New England appreciate it.

Today we went to Dunkin Donuts for lunch. I felt I had to go sometime because there are so many of them and there sandwich things on crescent roll looking bread actually looked good. I got a turkey/bacon/cheddar sandwich and a chocolate donut with chocolate sprinkles. Both were actually really good. it was like 5$. Not quite as filling as I wished. Usually I/we in the apartment never eat junk food like that. Elder Beck is trying to lose weight, Elder Concha (aka mr. vain aka mr. muscles) is the leader of the health bandwagon (this morning I saw him crack 3 raw eggs into a cup and drink it because there was no time to cook them). Most days for lunch I just plop some tuna from a can into a burrito and eat that as the biggest part of my meal because I don't want to have to cook anything and it has lots of protein. Also I eat an apple basically every day and I like to put peanut butter on most everything.
Did I ever tell you about the weird stuff people say here? I sort of like the phrase "all set" now and think it's funny to say it too. People here really call a drinking fountain a "bubbler". Some youth in the ward in all seriousness told me it didn't make any sense to call it a drinking fountain and that "bubbler" was way less weird. On my donut this morning I had chocolate sprinkles, but if they were all different colors they (the sprinkles) would be called jimmies. People really do drop the R out of a lot of words and add them to the end of wards that end with A. It's a good idear to read the scriptures and a bad idear to break the commandments.

Quick football thing: so if the Rams finish with a better record than the patriots will mom switch favorite teams? I bet Josh Mcdaniels and that one reciever who's name I forgot now realize it was a bad idear for them to leave STL. also how has Steven Jackson been doing? does he still run a lot or is it really Sam's team now?

Nothing hugely eventful happened this week. We've had an unusual amount of people cancel appointments with us in the last few days which was kind of lame. We were able to reschedule though, so things should still turn out good. While Elder Beck and I were doing red cross service last week there were these other 2 college age girls also volunteering and they seemed pretty interested in the church and missionaries and stuff. They were so interested that they invited us to go hang out at a bar with them later. We turned down the offer.

I remembered another interesting thing. In my weekly email to President last week I wrote about how we usually play sports on saturday with the youth and some investigators and we were bummed that we had to stop. we talked about it as an apartment and figured we would do it a few more times but try really hard to see if we could get them to do it without us/get enough people to come play without needing us. A few days later president Packered called our phone asking for me, which was very exciting. He said he read my email and he agreed that the Saturday sports sounded like a very good thing. He has a lot of trust in us and all the missionaries and he basically said he was ultimately up to us what to do, but he didn't think it would really be worth missionaries time on saturdays. He basically said the same sort of things we decided as an apartment, that we don't need to instantly stop and but we should try to keep it from dying out. If we can get the YM/YW leaders involved it should be able to work. He always tells us that he reads all our emails, and it was really cool that he actually called because of it.

That's everything. I love you all. If you're ever having a bad day, just remember "The power of the NFL has shifted to the NFC West."
Enjoy conference, we are the only church in the whole world that gets to have it!
I'll write again in just 5 days!

P.S.
Elder Beck is still emailing, so I'll throw in a few extra things. About Kylie's pen pal, I hope someone does write her, I'm suprised neither have. If no one does by next week I'll ask a few more people if they want to. Also about volleyball, it's good to hear her serves are doing well. On most middle school teams I really think if there was a player who could get their serve over every time, but did nothing the whole rest of the game, they might be MVP. The winner is almost always whichever team is the best at serving
About Chase, that sounds very exciting. It's weird for me to think when I get home he'll be a regular working, graduated person though.

our plan for the rest of the day: go home and write a letter or two. Have dinner at 5:30 with some members, and we'll talk about how we can help them do missionary work. After that at 7:30 we have an appointment with an inactive member and she said she would invite her boyfriend over too, so hopefully that goes well and we can get both of them to church. Then we'll come home and plan for the next day, I'll brush my teeth and floss, write in my journal and go to sleep. The past few days we haven't had as many set appointments, so we've had to do more tracting type stuff, but the next few days are already pretty packed, so that's good. District meeting on friday will be interesting to see the new people. We have 2 new fresh greenies coming in.

Also, let me know how Nana and Bumpa are doing, and what it's like for them in the mtc/different sort of mission.
tell them that if they see anyone who looks like I know them to say hi. If griffin can bump into people I know in McDonalds, they should be able to also. I have no idea who the mysterious medium length blond girl is. It must be someone from highschool because all my BYU friends should be at BYU and don't have a reason to be in Arcadia. I didn't know many blond people in arcasia though.
thats all.

There. NOW you have all the news.

ELDER COLE