October 8th, 2012

All right time for another letter I suppose. This week was all right. Of course as we all know this week was General Conference. I don't know where you got the assumption we didn't get to listen to the Saturday Conferences, we definitely did. Conference this week was like...the Superbowl for missionaries. It was pretty fun.

So this week we got our monthly miles cut in half. We used to be able to go 1800 miles a month, but now we can only go 900. Which is really inconvenient because our area stretches out super far. Plus our house is about 5 miles from any actual towns that we work in. And Paola is a good 20 miles away. Because of this, our work has slowed down, because we can't simply go where we want now. It's really stressful and kind of disappointing but oh well. We'll manage.

Anyhow, because of the lack of miles now we've had to do a lot of tracting. Honestly who likes tracting anyways? All in all though we had a pretty good week. We got a new investigator this week named Ben. He had missionaries stop by his house before but he said he wasn't interested. But then he saw a commercial and he decided that he wanted to hear about it now. So we gave him what he wanted, the lessons. And he's now decided to be baptized. He's not anywhere close to being converted yet, but with work he'll get there. He kinda seems like a go with the flow kind of guy, so I don't want us to rush him and get him into something he doesn't really know yet, we want to literally convert him.

Conference I guess was the highlight of the week. For the Saturday session we decided to watch conference at the Church in Paola. And because of our lack of miles to go anywhere, we were in Paola the whole day. But Conference takes a big chunk of the day away so it was a pretty relaxed day. The first session of Saturday was pretty cool. they talked a lot on some really serious and touchy subjects, like abuse, sexual sins, and so forth. Of course the announcement about the mission age requirements going down was pretty intense as well. It was funny watching the faces of the people at conference when the announcement was made, they were blown away.

The second session of Conference on Saturday was a mess for us. We had gone out to lunch and left the Satiellite on and so forth at the Church, but when we got back, it wasn't working anymore, and we had no clue who to call about it or anything. (We were the only ones that actually were at the Church to watch the morning session that day.) The older gentleman that was in charge of everything eventually came to the Church after we attempted to go to the library to watch the afternoon session (That endeavor failed because the library closed at 4 that day.) But we got back when the older guy was there, and he just took us to his house to watch the rest of that session.

Afterwards we went back to the Church to help him fix the Satellite and get the Priesthood session going. Before priesthood session, both Gardner and Paola wards had a combined dinner at the Church which was nice. There was a lot of food, but I could hardly eat anything because my stomach has shrunk a lot since I've been on my mission. I brought my blanket for the morning and afternoon sessions and so I had it there when the priesthood session was going. Me, my companion, and a member Brother Sargent had a good laugh about the blanket. Brother Sargent ended up inviting us over for the Sunday sessions of Conference because no one else had, and it was pretty fun. I brought my blanket.

Anyways all in all it was an ok week. We've been just trying to work and be obedient. Conference was a nice break for us, and now we have P-day, woohoo.

Last week was all right. We've actually had transfers now and I ended up getting a new companion. Funny that I'm already on my third companion. Seems I'm having a lot more companions that everyone else that I came out with. My new companion is named Elder Top. He's from Albany, Oregon, and the best way to describe him is, a hipster. He's 22 and before his mission he went to the University of Idaho getting a music major. He plays Trumpet and Piano, and does Jazz music. He's a pretty interested person, sometimes I hate him, sometimes I don't. But he's a really good missionary. The reason I call him a hipster is he has some interesting clothing choices. He's really into skinny ties, weird fabric ties and so forth. He also wears slap bracelet watches. (You know those slap bracelet things we used to buy at the DI? Now they have those, but they're watches, actually pretty cool.)

Now that I have a new companion, I'm basically completely taking over the area of Gardner and Paola. I'm not the "Senior Companion" but I basically am. I'm helping Elder Top come on in and take over the area. Honestly there's not a lot going on lately. We had a surge of referrals the last two weeks, but now it seems we're getting dropped by investigators and so forth. Our main goal lately has been trying to find some more people. Elder Top has always had pretty good success with tracting, but unfortunately it doesn't really work well for the Gardner area. We went tracting a bit the past few days and we've only gotten one potential investigator. We're trying to work more with the members and get some good referrals from them, but for the rest of the week we have an all right schedule. We have some people that our awesome ward mission leader wants us to start seeing and I've set up some appointments with people that we haven't seen for a while.

Elder Top also had the same trainer as me, Elder M. It's funny because we talk about him a lot, but Elder M. was a lot different with Elder Top than me. Elder Top almost makes Elder M. seem like this super mean guy, but I thought Elder M. was super nice and fun to work with haha.

Things are going well though, just trying to get the area started up and introduce Elder Top to the area. We work all right together, though sometimes he simply drives me crazy. Anyways, I need to write my mission president now, and then I'm going to go and enjoy the rest of my p-day. I'm going to take my companion out to Oklahoma Joe's so it should be a good lunch.