Week 4

Hey friends and family!

This week has been a lot of fun and full of interesting events. So I'll try to keep it concise.

They've started to ask me to step in a bit more with assisting in family history classes, which have been quite a bit of fun. They've mostly been on quick-batch indexing and building trees. However, it has been very amazing to be able to help people see their trees populate and seeing all the ancestors they didn't know anything about.

On Friday we had the opportunity to go over to the mission president's house and have pizza. When I say pizza I mean actual pizza. He has a stone Italia pizza oven in his back yard. It heats up to over a 1000 degrees and cooks a pizza entirely in under a minute. I took some photos of the event which I have attached below.

 

On Saturday we had the Family History Library Block Party. They fenced off the entire street out front and put on a full production. We had food trucks, games, inflatables, bands, and decorated the entire FHL. It was a very busy day for us and a lot of fun.

On Monday we had our mission conference in the little theater at the Conference Center at 7 in the morning. I will say getting up at 5:45 was a little rough. At this mission conference we had the new batch of elders for the month introduced. So our numbers have now shot up from 80 to 93, breaking the previous record for most elders entering the mission at once, placed my by batch only last month.

 

I'm glad all is going well with you guys, and happy fathers day!

I'm glad Allison and Robyn are staying busy. The more I've been out here the more I've seen the value in that. I'm glad Grandma and Grandpa were able to help out a lot, and tell Grandma I hope her rotator cuff gets better. That's awesome that dad's making such wonderful progress on recovery. It's really one step at a time. Last Saturday was actually really interesting. Two other elders, and my companion and I went somewhat proselyting that night. We weren't really trying to place Book of Mormon's or anything. However we were going around City Creek Mall and just talking with people. There were many times were we would notice a change in people's faces from the time we started talking to them to the time we finished. Some would be looking quite sad with themselves and by the time we left they would have this glow on their face that was really quite amazing to experience.

Something interesting with the Family History Library. We have a deaf conference coming up, and the ZLs asked us to learn basic introductory sign language. I now know enough to do simple directions around the library, which is really quite fun. On Sunday my companion and I were in the tabernacle listening to the choir get warmed up for Music and The Spoken Word, when we got a call that we were needed last minute to go to an assisting living center known as Abadon. We went there and It was really quite amazing. We handed out the sacrament, but we also got to give a few blessings which was really quite special. I told you guys about the new Chinese experience on the discovery floor a few weeks ago, but I don't think I gave a very good description of what it looked like so here's a few photos:

 

My living conditions are actually pretty great!

We have 4 people including me in our apartment:

It's actually not that small. Here's a photo:

 

There's two bedrooms and a bathroom off to the left not shown.

As far as cooking goes. It is a mix of salads, juice, milk, toast, cereal, fruit, and microwave stuff. I think I have the healthy balance between healthy and slightly less.

I actually had a goal for this transfer to lose at least seven pounds, and I'm already nine pounds lighter.

I don't really have a typical day. There is a Zone schedule, where I work in the Discovery center a lot. However it is manipulated a lot. Whether for teaching classes, meetings, service projects, dinner appointments, temple, etc.

So that helps to keep it interesting. Each day is different, and each day is amazing.

Here is a photo of my companion hanging up his sheets to dry after the water getting shut off last week. I thought it was pretty funny how it was three quarters or this. It was still a lot of fun though.