23 March 2015

The week started out by scrubbing tables. A family in our ward has a backyard that looks a lot like a nature preserve from the garden of eden, complete with a 30 foot wide, 15 foot deep rock pool, but she needed help cleaning off some tables for her friend's wedding. So, we did that, then went out tracting. Does anyone remember the He is the Gift or Because of Him videos? Well, the church is coming out with a new one, and already gave us cards to pass out for it. The video itself won't be released until April 22 or 28, one of those, but we still are handing them out like candy. That night, the family that was feeding us tried to make corned beef, but left it in the freezer and so instead took us out to the Wet Burrito, a Mexican restaurant. There, I got lengua and cabeza tacos- cow tongue and cow cheek. They were pretty good, actually. Later that night, the family having us for dinner the next day called and asked if we'd had corned beef then, because they wanted to make it that night. 

Wednesday, we were doing more service- sanding cabinets. A different member wanted to repaint her kitchen, but first we had to rough up the last coat so it would stick. We sanded all of the doors, but later we're going to sand the frames then paint them all. It'll be fun. 

Thursday, we went to district meeting, and then to Buffalo Wild Wings. One of the elders (Henderson) in our district had bet another (Mahe) that he couldn't fit a whole slice of pizza in his mouth. Elder Mahe is a Polynesian, and is correspondingly gigantic. He did it, and so Elder Henderson had to take the Blazin' Challenge. That's where you try to eat 12 of their hottest wings in under 6 minutes. You have to sign a waiver to try it, they're so hot. 

He did it in 3 minutes, 2 seconds!

Friday, I got my feet checked out. They were so flat, that the podiatrist, who has been practicing for over 40 years, was impressed. The appointment took just about forever, because their computer had to update first, then the scan, then waiting for insurance, then everything else. We had dinner with the ward organist that night.

Saturday was fun- cleaning inspections. So now, our apartment is immaculate. Judging from past experience, that won't last, though. Right after that, we went to help a family move. They had a big, 2 story house, and the garage was stuffed with boxes. What made it fun was that at first, it was us and one high priest to move it all. Fortunately, the elders quorum showed up pretty quickly. We got it all moved in a few hours (they weren't taking it all that time, because they couldn't yet move in to the other house for some reason), then had studies. After them, we had dinner and the evening session of stake conference. It was good, but the theme was councils. And through them, meetings, every missionary's favorite thing.

 

Sunday took a while to pass. We had yet more stake conference, themed on obedience and it's associated blessings. Then came a "dinner" at 2, with the podiatrist that checked out my feet on Friday. He was the bishop, then the ward mission leader, and is now called as the first counselor in the mission presidency. Very missionary oriented. We also got passed a solid-looking referral from the zone leaders. The funny part about that was that we passed them an investigator (he was YSA age, and they are the YSA missionaries) a long while back, and he was at stake conference!

I learned a new funny thing about California, too.only in California would they pass a law dictating that restaurants can't serve you water until you ask for it.

Something I forgot to mention a while ago- there is a lot of missionary jargon, that we have been counseled to avoid. It's not obvious stuff- it's phrases like "being born" to mean coming to the mission, "dying" to mean going home, "dads, grandpas" being trainers and trainer trainers. But apparently, some people are turned off from our church after they hear that 20ish missionaries in our mission die every 6 weeks, so we were told to quit. Also, we were told to always refer to people by their titles and last names, like Elder ____ or Sister ____. After the meeting, a missionary went up to President Taggart, and asked if he could call him P-Tag. He got the obvious response- "That is not acceptable behavior for a representative of the Lord," but the mission president now has a new nickname.