Uneventful Week

Hello!

 I am doing great! My week wasn't too shabby. It was a bit uneventful however. Haven't had any crazy driving stories this week! Wow the house seems to be coming along! You guys should have it be blue or something cool! Not chocolate again! On Mother's Day I will skype so be prepared. Hopefully we can figure it out this time around so we don't have to use FaceTime again. It hasn't been raining too much here this week. It rained I think once or twice, and just for a moment. We are going to be getting into that season soon though. Since you guys have my plaque could y'all update the picture to a amore recent/better photo haha 

Last Monday was really fun. We did our laundry, emailed, and like the usual we played basketball for a long time. At Taco Bell there is a thing called happy hour. It's when their drinks and freezes are only a dollar! It's really nice on hot days to swing by and grab a strawberry starburst freeze. It really cools you down.

Tuesday we had a normal day. Finding and teaching. We ate with some members, the M family, and it was really good! They live in this really small trailer in old Baytown. It was humbling, they were so grateful for what they had!

Wednesday we had Spanish class with Hermano Pomeroy. He teaches us every week. That night Elder Brudsal, my MTC companion and Elder Riches son, was in Baytown on an exchange with the YSA elders. We met up at the new Krispy Kreme and were able to catch up a bit. He was the only one from the MTC I hadn't seen in a while. Didn't try the donuts though. Riches and I are on a health kick. We have been working out every morning and I've lost weight actually. We have cut out sugar and bad foods too. Even eat fast food less!

Thursday was a normal weekly planning day. Nothing really notable happened!

Friday was district meeting. Elder Riches and I taught a segment on spiritual gifts. It was really good! Don't tell Riches, but what we did was my idea haha We had a spiritual "auction". So what we did was we explain what spiritual gifts were, and how to get them. Then we presented what we call effort bucks to them. Effort bucks represent the effort that is needed to obtain a spiritual gift, like prayer and fasting etc. Each person got fifteen effort bucks to use to bid on various gifts. Then we had an auction! We bought candy boxes and attached a gift onto each one! As they were bought we explained what the gift was, and the person who bought it read off a tip and trick of how to develop the gift that we had written on the box of candy. Then at the end we talked about how we could use these gifts in our missionary work. It was a really fun segment. Everyone was laughing and participating. We all learned a lot about them and their significance. Elder Riches and I nailed that one!

Saturday was fun as well! We had a pass off lesson with the English Elders. We all taught a guy named Edgar that we found. He was cool and had good questions. It's too bad we had to refer him to English. He spoke Spanish and was Mexican but preferred English. That night we had a stake party at the church here in Baytown. It was really fun. Played kickball, a bit of football, and ate some barbecue. The activity didn't have too much people there. It was small compared to Utah! It felt like a ward party haha. But towards the end more people showed up so that was good. I don't know if you are part of the Texas Houston East Mission page on Facebook, but someone was taking pictures at the party and said he would post some pictures of us Elders.

Sunday was good. Church was great and afterward we got some tacos from some of our favorite members. The Rodriguez family is so fun. And she cooks some really good food! Other than that it was a normal day. Last night the English Elders came over and cut Riches' hair. They aren't professional... they buzzed his head on accident! It looks like Riches just got deployed in the army haha!! Luckily I was there and after they left, I cleaned up their mistakes with some scissors and it looks a lot better. They had left it all sorts of different lengths, and shaved one side by his ear on accident. It was funny.

Well I hope everyone has a good week! I love y'all!

Happy Easter!

Happy Late Easter!

Easter was pretty good! We had church, I gave the opening prayer, and it was a good sacrament meeting. We actually were able to have American food for Easter!! I was so pumped it was good! So a member in the English ward speaks Spanish, and taught Spanish for a long time so he is really good and teaches us a Spanish class every week. So they had us over for an Easter dinner. It was a good change. Missed having dads ham and rolls though. And mashed potatoes... those were good.

The weather had been pretty nice lately. Except for Friday it was really hot that day and we were out in the sun all day.

Carlos is doing okay. He said he still feels really catholic, but we are working really hard at him. Hopefully he has a change of heart. I've been in this area since February 8th so it has been a few months.

So Wednesday we almost perished! I was driving on the feeder road next to the 146 and was in the far right lane just cruising along. A truck got off of the 146 and starting merging over, crossed the first two lanes and came up right next to me. We were going about 50 mph so it was quick. Then this maniac of a driver started merging into our lane! Driving us off the road! I honked at first because he was merging slowly but he kept coming and then merged fast! So in my quick thinking, I had to break really hard and get out of the way so I had to go up and hit a curb a bit. Otherwise we would've been hit!! We are lucky we weren't hurt and the car was fine and dandy.

Other than that this week was really uneventful. Hence the lack of photos.. hopefully this week will be better. Sorry for the short email but there just isn't much to talk about. 

Love y'all

"The usual...rain."

Crazy Caterpillar

Hello!

It didn't really rain at all this past week. It was pretty nice, just a bit windy a couple of days out here. The next few days this week it is supposed to rain however. And I heard one of them it will rain really bad. It's getting really hot out here. It's been real bad some days, but we have had a couple cool days like Saturday. Being hot and humid isn't the best combination out there. You'll be sitting in the car with the a/c on and once you get out you start sweating because it's so hot and humid. They never caught the guy that shot the cop, or at least I haven't heard anything about it. Baytown has been pretty  crazy since then though. Cops are everywhere right now. They had a funeral for the guy and traffic was bad. Super busy. The town has been supporting him though, lots of stuff like "back the blue" signs everywhere.

Carlos was set for the 15th but we will have to push it back because he has not been to church yet. His schedule has been super busy because he works in taxes and he has had to work a ton. Pray that he can come to church. Other than that we really have no solid people. We have a lot of new investigators but none of them are really genuinely interested. The people in this area are rough to work with.

It's hard to email them back if they don't email me in the first place! I try my best to email them but I haven't got one from any of them for a while.

Wow the house already had an offer? That's so cool! Hopefully everything with that goes smoothly. I'm excited to be able to come home to a new house. I wasn't attached to the other one so it'll be good.

I was able to find pants! I didn't spend all the money so I thought it would be a good idea to transfer what I had left to savings so I wouldn't spend it all. You know how I am! I'm an Impulsive buyer!

Not much is new with me this week. We had zone conference, and zone meeting both in the same week. Friday and Wednesday. They were long. One day we were at a members house for dinner, and during the prayer Elder Riches tapped my arm. I opened one of my eyes just a bit and saw Riches pointing at a huge caterpillar crawling on his arm! He then flicked it off his arm onto the floor. It was so funny I was trying so hard not to laugh!! We had no idea how the caterpillar got there.


Mexican food is still not growing on me! Luckily here in Baytown the members are actually pretty good cooks. And some of them cook other stuff too so it's not just Mexican food all of the time here. It is nice. We even get the occasional dominoes pizza! Those days are really good days. I met this crazy catholic guy the other day. We were on exchanges and I was with Elder Dial in the English area. We were talking to him, his family are members, but he feels he does not need to be baptized again. We mentioned that we believe it needs to be done by the proper authority, and he freaked out at us! Yelling and calling us arrogant. He was mad that we thought we were the only church with the priesthood. He went so crazy! So that was interesting.

That's about it for this week. Love y'all have a good one

Who knew Texas was so green?

Hello hello

Howdy is a good word to use as I am feeling more of a Texan now. A member here has given me a few belt buckles and wants to take me shopping to go get a real Texan belt for it. Who would've thought! We had so much rain here! Wednesday rained so hard! The apartment complex flooded really bad, not up to our apartment though. We were lucky. Elder Riches and I couldn't go anywhere because of the weather, so we decided to have fun! We changed clothes and went out in the pouring rain. We ran around, jumped in puddles, and went swinging on the swing set. Talk about good stress reliever.

Carlos is doing good. We have him on date for the 15th, but he hasn't been coming to church because things have come up. Pray that he will be able to and that he can be baptized. He's so close!

From Baytown the temple is about an hour and a half, on the other side of Houston. It is outside of our mission so we are lucky we can go. We missed our session though when we went so we had to wait. Whoops

Conference was great! It's different though, watching it here at a chapel and not in our home eating some puppy chow. I miss our traditions like the egg mcmuffins! I enjoyed all of the talks, they were really good. Elder Holland always gives good ones! I really liked Choi's was that his name? I busted out laughing when he said to look up, open our mouths, and drink it. I don't know why but it was real funny to me and my companion.

Last couple of weeks none of my siblings have emailed me. That's a shame isn't it!

Elder Riches and I had a lot of really cool adventures this week. We were able to go all the way down to tri city beach because we had extra miles at the end of the month. It was cool, had a cool view. That's where we took all the panoramas. Way out we could see big ol cargo ships moving around. Tuesday we went out biking and came across a forest trail. It was really cool and who knew Texas was so green? I never would have guessed Houston was a tropical climate. It's nuts!

With Easter coming up, have y'all seen the Prince of Peace initiative? That will be really cool, similar to light the world. The videos are really good. Jesus Christ really is our Savior and Redeemer.

Have a good week y'all. Love you!

"Animal rescuers part 2! This little guy is Jo. We were out and about and Jo was in the middle of nowhere all by himself! Poor Jo. Time to find little Jo a home."

"Just us and our trip to the bayou"

"This mornings forest adventure. Who knew Texas was this green?" 

"Would you look at that A-Aron and Kat"

 "Why is there two of me?"

"Our adventure to the bay while finding homies to teach"

 

"Couldn't really swim well here. Just a few feet away there was a puddle up past our ankles mid-calf"

"Wowza"

"Current situation here in the great state of Texas. Hope our apartment doesn't flood!" 

"Good ol' dinner"