All right time for another letterrrrr.

It's probably going to be a short one...cause nothing has really happened in the past week. I think we're getting to the point where my letters progressively get worse and worse, sorry familio. Anyways, as I said last week, I'm now double-covering two areas that used to have a pair of missionaries for each. Paola and Gardner. Gardner you know about, just a small town with another small town 6 miles away, not much there. Paola on the otherhand is a huge area. We cover about 6 or 7 small towns. So every night when we go for dinner we usually have to drive about 40 mintues to the place. Which means that we spend a lot of time during the rest of the week when we're trying to find our way around.

Anyways I suppose the family I'll tell you about today is...the "H"'s. I don't even know if I spelt that right, but they have a weird last name. Anyways we had dinner with them just last night and they were pretty cool. Brother H is a hunter. He doesn't hunt with rifles and guns though. He hunts with a bow. His basement is completely filled with stuffed animals that he's killed all himself. He has 2 bears, tons of deer, anything you can think of. He even has an otter down there. He brought his baby downstairs with us and she started crying, I thought to myself. I would probably cry if I saw all this as a baby LOL.

Anyways Sundays are pretty fun now that we have two wards to cover. Guess who gets to go to 6 hours of Church of Sundays? This guy. It's gonna be especially fun next week when its fast Sunday and I'll have to go the whole 6 hours on an empty stomach. D:

Anyways sorry this is so short, I'm running out of things to say! We dont have many prospective investigators right now. So a lot of the time we're tracting on doors, which is just lame. And I don't have any fun stories from it, most people just aren't interested, but I haven't had anyone come at me with a shotgun quite yet.

Sincerely Elder Ellis

PS. The 109$ charge from Walmart was a GPS so yah.

Dear Mom,

Wasn't your power bill supposed to drop when I left or something? Haha, why were they even comparing your electric bill usage with the neighbors. Sounds weird but anyways. I'm not even gonna ask about why you guys have been having...moustache parties, but it sounds like Clark had fun. Anyways I guess I have to answer your questions.

Teeth brushing, retainer, washing sheets, first of all never write me that again LOL. I can take care of myself don't worry Mom. The other questions are okay. The new apartment is cleaner than the old one yeah. It's also smaller unfortunately, we don't have room for much, it's only like two rooms. I like the kitchen in the new apartment though. I guess we're kinda supposed to clean up the old apartment but we haven't finished that up yet. We have to call the Housing Missionary to come and take care of everything with us. But we've raided all of the good stuff that's left in the house. Now there's just furniture really. There's a treadmill in there but we don't have room for it, so my old companion is going to come and take it over to Kansas City Missouri where he's serving.

Anyways my new companion is pretty cool. We've been getting along just fine, getting along good actually. We've been having a lot of fun. We get up early at 6:30 and then head down to the Church 12 miles away and work out. He's started me on a Navy Seal training program and it's been killing me.

Our area is really hectic now. I'm covering both Paola and Gardner wards now. Suddenly we have two dinner calendars, completely filled up. So now we have two dinners scheduled every night and it's just crazy. We've also been dealing with the old apartment, so we haven't even really had a lot of time to even visit people. We even have two phones now. Things we'll be easier this week though I'm sure.

Anyways let's see, let me tell you about the "J" family this week. They're a really cool family we had dinner with a couple of nights ago. They have one son that's on his mission in California. Brother "J" works at a boxing store, he gives the missionaries products with defects that they can't sell, but they're still basically brand new so we have all this cool stuff from them. The "J"'s are extremely good cooks. The other day they cooked us brotz which were really good. But the best part were the baked beans they cooked. Real barbeque really is the best. Speaking of which I went to Oaklahoma Joe's which is extremely good.

I guess I should probably describe Paola for you. Paola is super...well I guess I can't say small. But it's super spread out, so it's like a small town with not too many people in it. Theres dirt roads everywhere and so forth it's all right. Anyways things are going good with the new companionship. He's not at all what I expected. I'm safe and fine, and you need to stop worrying about me brushing my teeth Mom. Anyways take care at home everyone.

PS. Sorry I don't have my new address yet. I forgot to write it down before I came here and my companion doesn't have it memorized, but I'll get it to you by next week. Probably earlier cause we'll have to go to the Library again sometime this week.

All right family email timeee.  It's going to be another short one - aww geez sorry.

Okay so this week was the Johnson County Fair.  Which means that basically for half the week I was sitting in a chair handing out popcorn to people.  It was pretty cool.  We gave out a lot of Book of Mormons.  A lot of people tried to bash on us while we were in the stall though which was hilarious.  We also had someone sneak a pamphlet underneath our pile of Temple Pictures.  It was basically "How I escaped Mormonism".  Talked about a lady who was a relief society president and got so caught up in typical anti-Mormon messages she left the Church.  We burned it later that night.  Overall the fair was nice.  It was torture at the same time though because of all the hot girls in short shorts.  Aww man.  ):

Anyways in this email I’m going to talk to you about....the...W family.  I'm not allowed to use their last name so they're the W family.  I'm not sure if I talked to you about them earlier but I'm going to again if I did.  The W family is way nice.  They live in the trailer park.  We visit this family about 2-3 times a week.  They talk and talk and never stop talking.  They're a lot of fun despite how hard they are to control.  They're less active, but we've been getting them to church the past few weeks.

Anyways this week is transfers week.  I'm pretty sure that I'm going to get a new companion and have to take over the area.  I'll still be training though, which means that I'm going to be someone's step-son in missionary speak.  I'm wondering if he's going to be as chill as my current companion, so I'm kind of worried about that.  Anyways tomorrow we find out and then I guess we're going to do transfers on Thursday.  I'm not really ready to take over the area but, I guess I have to do it.  Anyways there’s nothing else much to say.  I'm going to start telling you more about the families I visit because I've been doing a pretty poor job.  

Overall things are going nice here.  It's not been as hot, but this week we have the bike so its bound to get hot.  For some reason the weather is only nice when we have the car mind you.  Anyways, I hope everything’s going well.  Fill me in more about Grandma's condition and everything else.

P.S.

Just sending a small e-mail about transfers:  I'm going to be staying here in Gardner, but now Gardner is being combined with another city called Paola because not much is happening there.  One of the missionaries from Paola is going to be my companion now because his companion is going home.  Elder Whitworth is his name.   I'm going to be moving apartments as well.  So my address is going to be changing so don't send anything to the current address until I give you the updated address next time I get on.  Anyways I better get going.  We have to go from house to house to house tonight so that we can get pictures and say goodbye to all of the families we can.  We have bikes today too so it's going to be pretty bad.  At least with Gardner and Paola combining, I'll be full-time car from now on!

Dear Family and Friends.

Time for another letter. Week 5 I think it is. Nothing much happened last week to be honest. It was another hot week in Kansas. It was our turn to bike last week. 105 degree weather, biking all day. It's pretty much the life. We didn't get any new prospects of any sort last week. We're trying to find new people through some tracting and some member referrals but so far nothing. Things are pretty slow around here in Gardner.

We still have Liza on date for baptism. But she's not kind of been flaking with her appointments lately. She wants to get baptized still. But we don't have a lot of time to teach her. She works at Subway and it seems everytime we schedule something she gets called in for week. This week she went to Church with her Grandpa who is a member at least so that's good.

What else is going on. To be honest not much. We've been doing a lot of home teaching basically. There's a lot of less actives here so we end up seeing them a lot cause we can't get any new investigators. We also had a lot of meetings last week. It was District Leader Counsel so my companion had to go to Independence for a day. So I ended up going on exchanges with a member of my district back in the MTC named Elder Bartholomew. We walked cause he didn't have a bike so it ended up taking us 3 hours just to see one person and by the time we got back our companions were supposed to be back from the meeting.

On the bright side we're getting fed a lot still. We've only had one day so far that we didn't have a dinner at a member's house. Tonight we're supposed to be going to Ryan's which is a really good buffet. All the food is okay though because I'm getting so much work out from riding my bike. I'm going to start running in the morning as well now. My companion and the missionaries have been going to the Vitamin Shoppe lately so I bought some workout powder and some whey protein and stuff so that I could start getting on track with my physical health. So that's going to be nice.

I'm trying to think if anything else is really going on but nothing much is. This week we get a new car, a 2012 Toyota Corolla, it has blue tooth in and stuff, so after we play basketball and volleyball for p-day today we're going to take it back home. This week is going to be the Johnson County Fair and so we're going to be manning the booth for a significant amount of time throughout the week. It's going to be nice because we'll get some new investigators to teach and they'll be coming to us instead of us going to them and knocking on their door. Also transfers are coming up (The 16th) so we have a lot of families scheduling stuff with us before my companion goes home so they can see him one last time.

Anyways I can't think of much else to say, I'm sorry that my letters are gradually getting shorter. I did get Dad's snail-mail and so I'll probably get around to writing back to that sometime eventually. Snail-mail is fine with me though. It's a lot easier to write because I get a lot more time to write it. The library is so rushed because of the annoying time limit though.

Anyways I hope everyones doing fine still. I'm doing all right here. I'll write again next week.

P.S.

Describe my apartment and where I live... Hmm? My apartment sucks. It's super old and worn down. It used to be millitary housing. It's a mess, there’s lots of old stuff people have left behind. The carpet is stained with bike grease and who knows what. The bathroom is disgusting. The apartment is just a mess. The city is all right. It's pretty small. And flat. There’s some nicer neighborhoods, but there’s a lot of trailer parks and apartments. It's mostly just flat around here. We have another city in our area 6 miles away called Edgerton. It literally is just...the Edge. There’s nothing there except some houses, a gas station, and a bar (of course). Everything is just pretty ghetto. There’s a train that runs through all of Gardner pretty much. I don’t know what else I can describe haha.