Do you still call “it” the poop-shack?
haha, sometimes, not often. I've told that story to a few people though.
It seems transfers should be coming up again soon…true?
false. we're starting week 3 of the 6 week transfer today. right in the middle
Was there a story on your ending of last weeks letter; which really didn’t have an ending…were you suddenly kicked off the internet?
yes, sort of, i don't remember perfectly. I was running out of time, but accidentally did something that deleted everything! I tried to find something that would Undo, but couldn't find anything. Elder Gallagher said just push send and see what happens. It worked!
Any rain lately?
yes. It seems to rain here fairly often. There is a bridge going over a river we go over every day and its kind of fun to see how it goes up and down depending on the rain. There is a little island in the middle, and sometimes it's all covered except the trees, like the trunks are growing straight out of the water.
Any dinner appts last week?
ummm yes. There is someone here, Brother Biddle, who comes out with us to lessons at least every week, and he almost always takes us to lunch too. Usually subway. We used to love Burger king because they had 1 dollar bacon burgers, but those were discontinued :(
The relief society president had us over yesterday, she does that every other week. It's always her, 1 or 2 other RS sisters and a guy from the branch. It's hard to really talk missionary work in a group like that, but it's always fun. We also got fed by another family in the branch, they have 5 kids all in primary. Plus our usual tuesday dinner at a non-members (have I mentioned that?) and our usual thursday service at the community dinner, so we were fed pretty well.
That reminds me, we have left over spaghetti at home from yesterday. That will be good.
Do you find many people that don’t know you are a missionary for the church of Jesus Christ of Latter day saints….because of your dress….meaning that they have heard of the church?
I feel like basically everyone recognizes us as missionaries, but they don't always know what church. I've been asked "what are you selling?" a few times. Some people recognize our full name (LDS), some don't. Most all recognize "mormon" but not everyone.
last week we got a call from the referral center (this time it happened to be a Sister from the Oakland visitors center I think. I guess I should have asked what they have there that constitutes a visitors center), telling us about someone they've chatted with on mormon.org who logged on because of a card we gave them. That was fun to hear because we give out so many of those
Doing any fun activity today?
we got a free 60 day membership to BJ's, (do we have those in the west?) which is a lot like Costco, so we're going to try shopping in there, so I guess sort of?
You played tennis once; was that in this area? Were there just random rackets there? I could send you some of those big, foam tennis balls. That could be fun, if you had rackets and if there was a tennis court and if your companion wanted to play.
that was in my last area. there were random rackets, and some balls, but we also bought new balls because they were pretty dead. I think we played 3 times. It was ok, because it was nice to run and get kind of sweaty, but I was playing against my companion, Elder Stevens, who had no sports/athletic type background. It was a paradigm shift from the normal competitive approach to sports. He really liked it though, I wonder if he still plays.
Do you have a favorite hymn you like to sing in church?
Angels We Have Heard on High. Doesn't matter what season, we should sing that one more often (and all the Christmas ones). There's a lot I like. I really like a lot of the primary songs, me and Jayna have that in common. I like Called to Serve as well.
Does your mission pres have a favorite hymn he likes you all to sing at conferences?
No, not really. I heard at the last transfer meeting (that I was not at) all 3 talks we about humility and the closing song was Be Thou Humble, so he's not afraid to use them to send a message. I've heard him sing a few times too. Actually maybe the answer is yes; every Zone Conference (the biggest meeting) the RS in the ward provide lunch, and we always sing "As I Have Loved You" to them. related story: remember, I got here at the same time as President Packard, as the mission was shifting away from the last mission pres. I guess he and his wife made a song that was the "mission song" that was sung at every zone conference. I've never heard anyone say they liked it (it was weird) and it was sung at Pres Packard's first wave of zone conferences (that was the only time I sung it) but Pres Packard must not have liked it either because after that it was never heard from again.
This week we did a lot of the same good things as normal. Have I mentioned Marie Santiago? She is a new investigator we found, she was a former investigator from 2008. We've taught her 1 lesson, hopefully that holds on. One of our progressing investigators, is the lead in a community play, The Death of a Salesman, and I wish we could go see him perform it. He is pretty stressed, we helped go over lines with him once, he's on the stage the entire time.
We're making a branch mission plan, which is cool. I think it could help to have a plan backed by the branch council that the whole branch knows about. I think it'll mostly have the stuff we're already trying to do, but with the official support of the leaders, it could be extra good.
There's a less active sister we see every week. The missionaries have been doing that for a long time, mostly just reading the Book of Mormon. This last week we brought with us one of our newly called branch missionaries, a 19 year old (currently "undecided" about serving a full time mission) and asked if we could "practice" teaching the lesson with her. It went really well. Very good for him and for her.
Also a sunday school teacher was just called for the youth, so we're not doing that anymore. We're going to start having a Gospel Principles class, which is good. Apparently our branch presidency decided we really need one after last week when we had 2 investigators there and plural marriage and a few other things came up in class.
We a pretty good week ahead of us as well, a good number of lessons set up, and we have interviews with the president this week too, plus we're going on exchanges with a district mates.
Good luck to Quinn, good to hear things are going well thus far. He should chastise his RM roommates for not waking up at 6:30 to get a 30 min work out in the morning.
That's all. I love you!
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