Abilene week 16

Today was a GOOD mail day!

This week I got 3 packages! can you believe that? I wrote all of my grandparents the week before. And guess how they responded? They both sent me packages! haha. I guess I need to write them more often. And your package came on the same day too! It was super funny. I also got a letter from Lauren  that day.

So I had to take a picture with all of the spoils laid out. And tell Grandpa Moffitt that I have already worn all of the ties he sent me. I love telling everyone, "My grandpa wore this tie on his mission." They're all like, wow. That's so crazy! He took really good care of it. Then sometimes I tell them, it was only 3 years ago. They get a good laugh out of that. It's funny. Also, I already bought all the ingredients for Grandma Moffitt's salsa bean dip, and I'm going to make that this week. And the package from Grandma Coats was fantastic. I got tons of junk food, which I am very excited about. I am definitely sharing it though, because I don't think I could eat it all fast enough.
I loved the little M&M message you sent me too mom. I wrote down 9 questions for conference, and all 9 of them were answered throughout. When it got down to the very last talk, Russel M Nelson, I still had 1 question left, but it got answered, and I was so happy. Elder Nelson has become one of my favorite apostles, especially since he came and visited me in the MTC. I just love how he always asks questions that really get me thinking in all of his talks.

New favorite Pday!

 Last P-day we went to this place called Primetime. Let me give you a little overview. We payed 10 dollars each. For that we got 2 slices of pizza, 5 dollars in the arcade, one game of bowling, and one game of lasertag. Pretty legit, at least for a missionary p-day.

Lazer Tag

This second picture is me and Elder Hancock right before our laser tag game started. It's hard to see, but I thought the light was actually pretty cool like that. We also got a 2nd game of laser tag for free because Elder Martin's gun didn't work the first time. Pretty legit. We were only able to be there for 2 hours because there is so much other stuff we had to do on p-day like e-mail, shop, laundry there just wasn't enough time to stay there longer. I wish!

Funnel Fries.....Yum!

Elder Pasqualle bought some funnel fries for everyone to share.

 

... we aren't allowed to play videogames as missionaries right? Well, that's kind of hard in an arcade. I took the picture on the little motorcycle thing because I thought it was cool, but I didn't actually play the game. I just played ski ball and air hockey with my arcade money. It was fun.

Oh yeah!  That's right....I took it down!

On the bowling picture, I will have you all know that I got a spare on that bowl. Yes, I knocked that pine down.

Elder Moffitt and Elder King

Elder King got a package with mustaches this week. So we had to wear them. 

Anyway, these pictures are just of a very cool place we found this week. So we were biking down Champions St.  (classic Texas thinking they're all that), and then we see a neighborhood called Winners right off of Champions St. I tried to capture it in the picture, but then I took a zoomed in picture so you could see that's what it says. Anyway, the only thing that could have made it better would have been if house #1 was on that corner.

In both of this pictures I am standing in the exact same place. The picture was just taken at a different angle. I thought both were worth sending though. One was a boatload of cacti and the other has the path bending out behind me. This is just a little shortcut right in the middle of town that we have taken a bunch of times.

 

One night this week we had a sleepover with Elder Varvel! He is one transfer younger than me. He is a Spanish elder, and he is from Idaho. His trainers, the ZLs, Elder Martin, and Elder, went to lone leader training with the mission president one day this week, so he came over with us for a day. It was super fun. It was funny when we went to an all Spanish lesson and then when he got out he said he didn't understand what was going on. LOL. I am lucky to be in a Spanish branch. He is in an English ward.

This week for investigators: We had to drop Katarino's baptismal date because he just doesn't know enough. It is so hard to teach him. Yet, Elder King and I think he is accountable enough, so we continue to teach him. It's slow progress though. He understands what we tell him, but he just has a really hard time remembering it all. He was our only investigator to come to General Conference. He came for the Sunday morning session. Elder King went and watched it in Spanish with him. I understood most of it, but I definitely am going to re-read all of those talks. Haha

Sofia is doing great. It's hard to meet with her often because of her mom's work schedule, but when we do meet we always have a good lesson. Elder King has been doing lots of object lessons with her, and she is really understanding it. I don't know if I told you, but we found out that Damian, her dad, is not interested in the church right now he said. So we will continue teaching just her.

Eliseo is out of town this week. He is down in Odessa, where apparently there are lots of immigration police, and Nita is really worried about that.... yeah, that would actually be a problem for quite a few of our investigators.

Nicolas, he is really trying hard on the word of wisdom. He has cut down from 20 cigarettes a day to only 8. It's progress. Just keep having faith. Nothing for Alexandria and Alizay. All for Cesar is that we had a super powerful lesson with him where we just testified and testified and testified. But he is still afraid of commitment. 

 

Abilene week 15

While we were down in Midland we had to take a picture next to the famous "Rockin Rodeo" sign. Some missionaries made a bunch of songs a couple years ago that they put to the beat of real songs, but then added their own missionary lyrics. They did that down in Midland and named the CD they made Rockin Rodeo. Of course, those missionaries are "apostate missionaries" as we call them. All completely against the rules to be doing any of that or listen to those songs they made. BUT, when I get back I want to check all those songs our because they're really funny. And apparently, this Rockin Rodeo CD they made is famous in other missions all over too. Pretty cool!

 

When we were driving back from Midland I saw this big old thing rolling down the highway. There are a bunch of restaurants here called "Texas Roadhouse," and when I saw this house... in Texas... on the road... I had to tell everyone, "hey look! It's a Texas Roadhouse!" 

This is outside of Sweetwater. I hear it's the biggest windmill farm in the world. Another fun fact about my mission is that President Uchtdorf lived here when he was learning to fly planes. Awesome, I know right?

This Saturday it rained like crazy. And of course we don't have a car. So we walked around in it. It seriously never storms here. This first picture is only like 10 minutes after it started pouring. You can see the water flying out of the gutter and a little stream forming in the grass. This is the view from right outside of my apartment by the way.   

And here is me in my nice jacket you got me for my mission (which is super nice. And the inside zips out so it can be used when it's warmer too). And I thought the twirling umbrella looked pretty cool in the picture too. Anyway, just to put it in perspective of how much rain we got: there is this stream bed that we go by that is always completely dry, but Saturday when we went by, it was 5 feet deep and 30 feet across. No joke.

Seriously, my cooking skills are improving. Out of necessity. I don't really like eating peanut butter and honey sandwiches every day, so I am branching out. How do my turkey burgers look? Because they tasted delicious. I also bought a blender this week and I am now making fruit smoothies every few days which are healthy and super tasty.

We wanted to get in sooooo bad!

End of summer Branch party.  It was really fun, but man, it was so hot and that water was sooooo inviting!

Elder Moffitt and Elder King

Well, we are now officially in the second half of this transfer already. We were able to set a baptismal date with Sofia for the 19th of October this week. She could definitely be baptized then no problem, especially with her mom there supporting her the whole way. The only problem is, we are trying to work with Damian, her dad, too and get them baptized on the same day. The only reason we may move her date is so that we can get her dad baptized with her. That would be awesome. We'll have to see.

We met with Eliseo this week and had a good lesson. He has been reading the book of Mormon. We didn't set a date because we thought he was leaving this week for an undetermined amount of time. But it turns out it'll only be about a week. So now we want to set a date with him tonight. Him and Nita were both at church Sunday.

We had 2 lessons with Katarino this week. The first one was just about prayer. He is prayer shy, but we're working on that. He always forgets how to start a prayer. That stroke is working so hard against him. But we also taught him the Word of Wisdom this week and he remembered the whole thing. Weird how those things work. Leonardo (remember the guy who hadn't been to church for 20 years that we found?) came with us to the lesson. Leonardo rocked it. He shared his testimony, and did a great job teaching. My favorite part of the lesson was when Katarino (due to childish nature) opened the gospel principles book he was holding to a picture of Jesus Christ's second coming. He asked me to read what it said. We were in the middle of our WoW discussion at this point. I said, "well, it talks about the blessings of the word of wisdom." Then I slipped a WoW pamphlet in front of it and started reading from that. Elder King got this huge smile on his face, and I almost cracked up like 5 times while I was reading. It was great. It totally worked too.

This week we had an awesome treat. We were visited by a general authority, William R Walker. We drove more than 2 hours down to Midland Texas to see him. He is definitely an inspired man. I loved the whole meeting. And I am so excited for this week to get to hear General Conference (we're just going to the church for that). 

Anyway, no news from Cesar this week. No news from Alexandria and Alizay. We started teaching 2 more investigators. Ignacio (who told us his nickname is "nacho." Nacho is short for Ignacio. Now Nacho Libre makes so much more sense to me. My mind was blown by that this week. And we also started teaching a lady names Rosenda. Time is short. And time is out. That's it for this week. I hope you all know I love you so much and pray for you every day too!

And here is a picture I took late one night heading home from a lesson that I thought was super legit.

Chili night at the Bundy's