Time moves swiftly

Another p-day! This week has been great as always. Elder Coronado and I love serving together and are working hard in West Point. Today we got our suits dry cleaned, and it was definitely time.

So, recently I have been dragging out planning to be way long, so I wanted to get it done more quickly, in 30 minutes. So we started to do abs every night to motivate us to finish planning, so we can get to abs. It's funny how often it actually happens, and how often we get caught up calling missionaries in the zone, or fall asleep planning on the couch. I think it has only actually happened once in the past week. I guess that means we are working hard enough to be exhausted at the end of the day, or we are just very out of shape, because we ride in a car all day.

The no sugar thing has been good, we get offered dessert 1-3 times everyday and most people are ok with it, but they always need an explanation of why we are saying no. Some say good for you and others just seem unhappy that we said no to their dessert/candy. We ate with the Facers twice this week, and she hid all sweets in her house for us; she is the Kristiansen fellowshipper (one of them) and the ones we killed the turkey with at thanksgiving.

Our overabundance of vegetables with our chicken. Sorry, this is about the only picture I have on my iPad. 

Personal goal, zone goal, ipads, traveling trainer

The teaser paragraph he sent while he typed his letter. (He knows Mark, Jessica and I are all waiting to read his email each Tuesday.):

Goodbye Mont Vista...I will be travelling the mission with Elder Kipp all next transfer. The assistants told me to get ready for the hardest transfer of my mission! Who's excited?! It will be very tough, but I am excited...I will learn a ton, I know that, and be able to work closely with President Hiers…I am excited. They got rid of traveling trainers temporarily, but President thinks it is needed again with the new "five essentials" and how young our mission is. A lot of what we will be doing is going around training everyone on how to use it.

Elder Kipp was my zone leader my first transfer with Elder Salazar; he is awesome. I really, really like him. He is from Canada and went to ASU before the mission. We hit our goal of four baptisms this transfer, first time hitting my goal. Our zone also hit our goal of 15 by getting 16 baptisms...first time I have ever hit a zone goal!

Oh, and did I mention we got ipads? They’re awesome, aren't they Dad? They are really well made...still lots of glitches, but that is to be expected. We are only the third mission in the world to get them...it's a big change.

WELL, there is a lot of change happening this week in the Utah Ogden Mission and for me generally. The first big change is that we got ipads this week! Monday they were given to the zone leaders, but it was kept a secret. Then on Friday we had a zone meeting with president and a few other zones. They started the meeting off like normal, out of the scriptures, and then one of the senior couples walked in with a big brown box and said he had a delivery. President pulled something out of the box, and it was an ipad. Then we all immediately walked out to the hall, and they handed us all ipads, and we had a three hour meeting learning how to install everything and use our area book app.

Well I made it through another transfer!

The Zone

My zone leaders

Elder Salazar and I will both be staying in Montevista and absorbing the other half of the area that was previously covered by another companionship. In the past, for English missionaries there was only one companionship for every two stakes. Through the past couple transfers, our mission has been trying to work towards having one set of missionaries for each stake. So on Sunday, the transfer board was all done then President Hiers went to lunch with Elder Perry who told him that they wanted it done now. President Hiers went straight to the transfer room and changed everything up moving about 80% of missionaries to different areas and white washing a TON. It is a big and exciting change; a lot of stakes will be happy. It will also be more tough for those English missionaries to focus only on baptisms which is good; it will force a lot more less active work.

This transfer I plan on getting our ward council more involved by inviting them to set us up less-active lessons and hopefully that will be a good start to where we can eventually transition to having them set us up lessons with potential investigators. We will see how it goes; it'll take some time.

This week has flown by, and so has the p-day

A little taste of Hawaii? We went all out today...20 dollars for unlimited sushi and two appetizers. I ate a lot more than just what's in the pictures. Only three of us did it. I have never eaten that much of anything at once in my entire life. This is us eating the last bite. If you don't finish everything you order, you have to pay extra for it.
 ...best part is we went to the jump park right after. 

(I think he took this picture and sent it just to make his mom feel queasy.)

Today was a pretty good p-day. I am writing at the end of the day which is unusual. So this morning, we hiked a mile and half up to some wind caves. It was just going to be our zone then someone invited an entire other zone, so it was a big group of people. We ran on the way down. It was fun; it reminded me of Camelback. Then we went home and did studies. After that, we went grocery shopping, then ate Japanese food...unlimited sushi. Then straight from there, we went to the jump park (not a good idea to go right after eating unlimited sushi). Now we are here doing emails.... 

So we had one cool experience this week. We were at the end of the night, and I looked at my planner and there was an address scheduled into our night, and I didn't know where it came from. I looked around in our phone and planner and everything and had no idea where it came from, but Elder Salazar had it down too so we went to see who it was, and it was a member. She had been feeling a lot of pain and needed a blessing to be able to go to the temple the next day. So that was cool seeing how the Lord put us there, and we still don't know how it got in our planners. But the best part was her daughter was there, and she said she works at paradise bakery in Logan! She said if we ever come when she is working she will give us a 70 percent discount. Ok well that's not the best part,; but that was pretty awesome I had no idea they had those here.

"Best ward mission leader ever, from Buchanan, GA"

Elder Pyne, Elder Plowman, Elder Bassett

So, it has been a great week. Elder Plowman is awesome; we already knew that, but just to reconfirm. We are having a ton of fun-the three of us together. Elder Ward is also doing well travelling the northern area of the mission. We are kind of disappointed the travelling trainers are going to every zone except ours, so he won't come to us, but I guess that's good that they thought they needed to solve problems elsewhere. We are pretty lucky to have such a great zone. It feels like we have been in the house until dinner everyday. Between 12 week, language study, trainings, planning trainings, personal/companionship studies, we are in the apartment a huge chunk of the time. But we are pretty good about not getting distracted and have a good time together. It looks like our visa waiter friend, elder Pyne is suffering from beginning of the mission blues, as Uncle David calls it, so we are trying to help him stay happy and positive. Elder Plowman is a lot better at that stuff, so it's good he is here. My remedy for everything is just to go knock some doors, because that’s what I like to do…probably not very helpful, ha-ha.

Ana and Angel are awesome. They are such blessings! They didn't make it to church this Sunday, but that is our fault, because we didn't tell them enough about it so it was still unfamiliar. While I was on splits teaching a less-active, my companions told them about church and all the classes and what to expect. Then the member, Brother Camacho (like 65 years old) and I showed up, and he talked for a long time to them about how forty years earlier he had been sitting on the couch with his little kids listening to the missionaries and now all his kids were returned missionaries and had families of their own, and how he looked back and was so happy he met the missionaries. It was definitely a perspective they needed to hear. It made them realize how much we loved them and what a blessing this would be for their three little kids. They ask the best questions and have been reading The Book of Mormon. I really hope all goes well with them.

A Baptism!

Matching ties for conference

Well, Sister Maria Guadalupe Ramirez got baptized on Friday. Livin the dream baptizing a lady named Maria Guadalupe. It went well. There were more people there than there are at Mt. Lewis baptisms but still not a ton.They couldn't do it on the weekend, because her kids work weekends so we had to do Friday. The three of us sang a musical number, ‘Mas Cerca Dios de Ti,’ (Nearer My God to Thee). We did it without piano: first verse in unison, second verse me bass and them melody, and third verse I sang bass, Elder Ward tenor and Elder Pyne melody. And then we spoke after the baptism and told everyone to go do more missionary work since it was all members. Then the bishop said in two weeks we would sing in sacrament meeting…too bad Elder Ward is leaving!

So she was NOT happy about these pictures...she refused to take pictures with us then we went and sat down and pretended to talk to her then elder pyne said go and we looked over and smile.d..then once we got that one over with we just took one from in front..I think you can tell how excited about that she was, ha-ha.

Throwing down your weapons of war

So Elder Ward and I learned an important lesson this week that we would like to share with all of you. If you use dish soap instead of dish detergent in the dishwasher, it will NOT work, and it makes lots of unwanted bubbles on your floor. Just some advice we wanted to throw out there.

So we got a new investigator a lady named Maria. She has a husband and a son and daughter and her grandkids all living with her, but the first lesson was just with her. We just did a quick how to begin teaching type lesson planning to do the restoration with the rest of her family, which unfortunately still hasn’t happened yet. But she loves us probably more than anybody I have met in the mission. She is probably like 60, and before we left, she talked for like ten minutes about how much she loved the spirit we brought and our charisma, and good looks, and the way we dressed, and were educated, and professional. So we have this lady in love with us. She really wants us to come back for one reason or another; hopefully, we can get the rest of her family all together so they can get baptized together.

So, R- has been good. He came to church with us again on Sunday with his crazy son. We have taught him the plan of salvation and the word of wisdom this week. He has problems with everything in the word of wisdom except tea, so I guess you could call this a worst-case scenario. He was pretty surprised to find out we wanted him to quit smoking completely and not just slow down a little bit. He has already replaced coffee with soda, and honestly, I'll take it if that’s the best he can do, and he is down to a "little more" than five a day smoking so we need lots of prayers for him. Teaching him is the funniest thing. He prays in Spanish, but we talk in English. He invents his own adverbs and puts them at the beginning of every sentence. He has perfect English; so it’s not like he has an accent. He just uses his own, invented word choice. The only way to understand his English is just to listen to every other word and figure out what he’s saying. We are pretty happy to be teaching our first Ogdenite. Especially since our area borders J1:the Ogdenite capital. It is the only place in the mission where the English missionaries cover only one ward, and it’s the highest baptizing area in all of Utah. Ogdenites EVERYWHERE.

Life is Great Here

So this week has been great. Elder Ward is definitely my favorite companion of the mission. He is exactly like me...I love serving with me! Elder Ward is the most similar person to me I have ever met besides Dad. It still amazes us that we agree on every single thing..EVERYthing: how to work, obedience, what groceries to buy, never going out to eat, cleanliness. We even have the same weaknesses so we are pushing each other and our pride makes us competitive enough to want to beat each other. We are zone leaders over the Ogden East Zone. We haven't had to deal with anything really, yet as far as zone leader stuff except for a minor issue with a missionary not wanting to work very much anymore since he goes home soon, but that got worked out fine. We used the travelling trainers to take care of it. In our mission, they started doing something called travelling trainers. They are two missionaries that travel full time around the mission going on splits. They have their own car and phone and don't have any area. They don't have to be with a companion so they can drive alone which is kind of weird, but oh well. I'm glad I don't have to do it.

Elder Ward and I are working on charity together, and I am working on humility, too. But we especially need to work on charity with other missionaries and in our teaching. We have both always had good companions that showed love and held us back from being overbearing, but now we just encouraged each other. I couldn’t sleep the night before I got transferred, because I was so excited. Then we went to a lesson together the next day. It was a first lesson, and we pushed kind of too hard to set the date, and they weren’t having it. So we will set it next time, I guess, but we decided at that point we need to tone it down and not be too bold with people and make sure to show them love, too.

"Thank You"

And just like that, transfers are here again. The new 18 year-olds shifted the MTC schedule and made us have a five week transfer. It was of course a very stressful experience as usual leading up to it, but we have almost made it through. So I assumed only being with Elder Cabrera I wasn't going anywhere almost automatically. But we went to the office on Monday morning, and I bumped into Elder Ward. So elder gossip took me off to the side and said he looked into the transfer room and saw that there was a white guy Spanish next to him...which meant me or one other elder. So then the stress began. At 9:50 that night president called and told me that I would go to Jefferson 2nd to be a zone leader with Elder Ward. I am pretty excited. I have been wanting to serve with Elder Ward my whole mission! And I am going back to my greeny area except now I can speak Spanish. I also get the best apartment in the mission! In the bottom floor of our building, we have our own gym, and up the street, we are going to go to the high school everyday to workout. So my new zone leader meeting is tomorrow; then we are booked up with appointments the rest of the day so that is a good sign.

FYI- Elder Ward is a convert from North Carolina. He graduated college in three years, because his parents wouldn’t let him go on a mission until he got a degree. (He is a convert.) He is a fantastic missionary. He is the one who baptized the whole Rubio and Pena family. He was with Phil in the MTC and came out with me.

Hermano Rubio is the best!

trying out my new hat in the snow from tyson..it's so warm!

So the week started out with a fun shoveling snow experience. What do you get when you have two missionaries shoveling snow side by side with metal shovels? A split open pinky. It was just a bad angle, and then all of a sudden the metal blade went like a quarter inch into my pinky. So I haven't been able to bend my pinky all week, but we used some gauze, and it eventually stopped bleeding. So that was fun. I guess it's a good story maybe? I guess it’s not that cool.

We went grocery shopping today and laughed about how easy us Utah missionaries have it. We had unlimited sushi earlier this week, chicken salad the next day, and then grilled chicken. I am just talking about lunch-time, not even at dinner. Elder Shaw leaves in a week, and we cook together...everyday… until he leaves. We are having Santa Fe steak, couscous, and grilled tuna sandwiches. Life is pretty hard for us. We are going to President Reyna’s for dinner today at five, so that will be good, too. 

We went to a fireside last week on Saturday, because we needed to help clean up, and I was playing the piano for the Spanish number. It was put on by a lady named Janice Kapp Perry. (I think?) She wrote, “Army of Helaman,” “I Love to See the Temple,” and like a thousand other things. My favorite part was when she just had us all sing primary songs together. There was lunch after, so that was good. We brought enough leftovers home to feed like forty people. Then when the women ate, we went outside (there was a snow storm) and cleaned off the snow off their cars…I should have brought a jacket. It took an hour to clean up all the chairs. 

Diana is getting baptized on Sunday!

Mom requested icicle pictures. There are thousands of them here.

So we are emailing later today, because we just got to Layton! It's outside of the mission, but we had permission. We were with President Reyna (counselor in mission presidency), and I was talking about how I tried to get my pants tailored and the lady ruined them and cut off the excess fabric so they really can't be fixed. Then I said how the only way to get them fixed was really going to Men’s Warehouse, because they could do it for free. So he called president and asked to take us to Men’s Warehouse in Layton, and we went. I walked in with a Men’s Warehous tie, suit, and jacket, so they really liked me and did the best they could to fix my suit pants right there in about ten minutes. And the manager gave me his card and said they are opening a store up in Ogden and if I ever come buy a suit from him on my mission he will give me some free ties. So that’s cool that we will have one closer. Then Pres Reyna took us out to a place. I think its called Famous Daves. It was bbq...probably the first time I have had bbq on my mission so it was really good.

So Diana Robles has been pretty good. She is getting baptized on Sunday. She has changed a lot since she started meeting with us. She just looks happier and talks about how she doesn’t worry or think about her past anymore and just feels more tranquil (tranquilidad?). She is excited about it. We taught law of chastity and word of wisdom this week to her and she didn’t have any issues. She already has good standards about how to raise her kids and knows this will help her. It’s weird teaching her, because she has pretty much no concerns. We are teaching tithing tonight so hopefully that goes all well. She almost didn’t come to church this week. We were in ward council, and she texted us and said she can’t come. Elder Martinez went straight outside and talked to her and came back and told me that she was babysitting other peoples’ kids and had her own so she couldn’t come. So I wasn't satisfied with that and went outside and called her. Anyways I talked to her a few minutes using a few scriptures, and she ended up getting to church with two car loads full of kids. It was hard to keep them quiet during sacrament, but I don't care…she was there! So that went well. She ended up being really happy that she came.

I'm learning

The best zone in the world!

Sorry, still no snow..it actually got warmer this week...Christmas picture will be soon I hope,

and we are not getting transferred tomorrow.

OK, I will start with a report from Elder Falabella and the mission conference he did. There was a big push for family history, no surprise there. The problem is that I have no idea how to do family history to help people out, and at this point, I can't exactly learn it since I am busy with other things. I will see how it goes. But can y'all send out a pedigree chart that I can carry around? I should have one already, but they want us all to have one to show people, and it would be nice to have…just like four generations or even five if you can do that. Thanks.

He talked a little bit about obedience, not as much as I would expect. President Hiers gave a lot of training on loving our investigators, companions, and stuff like that. Elder Falabella gave a huge push for a refocus in this mission on working with the dad's first like Ammon did. Ammon really only converted one person, but then look at the result. That gave me a change of mind with the Sanchez family. Rather than focus on her so much, I will focus on him as the head of the house. Hopefully things will fall into place. But we haven't had anything with them this week, because they cancelled. It's frustrating sometimes how slow having one lesson a week or less can be, but that’s all people say they have time for.

As you can see, I did not send you any baptism pictures. The Padilla family cancelled. They want to wait for their daughter to come down to see the baptism, and they don't know when she can. It is a good excuse, but they have had good excuses for several months. And on top of that, we haven't gotten in touch with them, because they have dropped every lesson and didn't come to church. We went an hour before and reminded them, and they said yes they would go and then didn't. I wasn't very happy, and I don't know what to do with them right now. They say they want to get baptized really soon, and he means it, but she is only hindering his progress and continues to make him wait. Any advice on how to handle that? Hopefully it will get straightened out this week, and we can set a date when all their family can be there, and she will agree not to cancel. I was pretty firm that this isn't something she can cancel last minute last time when we spoke, but I guess it didn't have an effect.