Cloudy Times in Oregon

Hello One and All. So first off I will clarify for dad, I am not corresponding with others my lack of email content is just from lack of things to say. Anywho, thanks for the phone number mom, I'll get that resolved today. This has been a slow transfer for mail, but last night both me and Sauceda had a nice little stack, it made the week a whole lot nicer.

So, what has happened to me the last week? Well I suppose I'll go ahead and explain the title, times are good, but the sun has been obscured for the past week or two. Some rain, the snow is all gone. Maybe I'm crazy but I love the rain, so hopefully some day I'll spend some time in the Vancouver areas. Also, due to I'm not sure what to be honest, we are very much ahead of schedule on how many miles we have left for the month. So we've been riding our bikes around like real missionaries. It's been fun, despite the extremely sore backside I enjoy it. We ride around Irrigon in the mornings and then load the bikes on the car and drive to Boardman, park the car and ride the bikes around there until it's time to go home. Yesterday was INCREDIBLY windy. We were in Boardman and almost getting knocked off our bikes. It was pretty nice when the wind was at our backs because we didn't have to peddle, but when we were going into the wind we could hardly move, so we ended up walking our bikes around for the day.

The work is going along rather nicely. There's one couple and their brother we have been teaching and have on date for the 29th. The couple needs to get married before then, and the brother just moved to Kennewick, so we sent his information on. All three of them came with us to church in the Boardman ward, so we got out the translating equipment and translated the meeting for them. I started and had gotten through the Sacrament prayers and all the hymns when the first speaker (the high councilman's son) got up to speak. I've translated entire fast and testimony meetings before and those are pretty easy, because each talk is really short and everyone says more or less the same thing. But this guys talk was jumping all over the place, and I was tripping all over my words and really struggling, so I hurriedly apologized to them (the investigators) and then passed the head set over to Sauceda who finished the meeting. One really neat thing that happened was the High Councilman got up and at the end of his talk bore an awesome testimony to them in Spanish. They really appreciated it. It was a good meeting, afterwards we found an empty classroom and taught them a lesson.Tonight I'll be doing an exchange with the Zone Leaders.

So Sauceda will stay in Hermiston with Elder Yamada, and Elder Buchanan will come back to Irrigon with me. I'm pretty excited because me and Buchanan get along really well, he's an awesome missionary. So that'll just be until tomorrow. Should be fun.

There was one experience this week that was rather unfortunate. I won't go into the details of it, but I found out why two of our former investigators became former investigators from a very angry neighbor of theirs. Apparently there had been some sort of misunderstanding or miscommunication from my Spanish that I guess offended them. They are still very happy and pleasant with us whenever we stop by to say hello, but the neighbor was much less pleasant when we street contacted him. Gave me what-for.

On a more pleasant note. We knocked into a Jehovah's Witness (Spanish) the other day and had a very lovely chat with her. We were talking about our beliefs in the Garden of Eden and what went down there. She explained some of her beliefs to us and helped me to understand the role of the 144,000 as they see it. We asked her if we could give her a card and she said yes only if we would take something from her. We agreed and she ran off to get it. When she came back it was a nice little pamphlet about the Garden of Eden, so we said that we should get to give her one of our pamphlets to make it a fare trade, so we gave her the Plan of Salvation pamphlet. She promised to read it and we promised to read hers. It was a good tracting experience.

Last night we got a call from our recent convert (that was terrified of being baptized) aunt, saying we needed to come to her house (the aunt's, house that is) and give her a blessing. (She's been having a real hard time with panic attacks). So we went over right away. We'd been there once before to bless her son who was very sick at the time. But both times the aunt and aunt's friend were there. We've now had two very lovely chats with them in which we've gotten to explain different aspects of how the church works to them. This Friday we'll be going with them to their bible study class, and then they'll come with us to church on Sunday in exchange. It should be fun, they are very nice to us. They are very...I guess you could say "feisty" but they are very nice to us. Last night tthe convert's tia gave us a worship cd that one of her ministers put together. The minister is from Peru and tia said that the cd was made there. But after we put the cd in the car within two seconds me and Sauceda both started laughing because it was the most Mexican thing ever. Definitely not from Peru. It was this Mariachi"ish" music with a guy possessing a thick Mexican accent singing about different reasons that Jesus is great. It was kind of fun I guess, I liked it because I could understand most of what was being sung.

Well, I think that does it for me, Dad, hopefully this satisfied your desire for content. Like I said I just don't usually have much to say or can't think of anything, but here's a pretty good example of what my weeks are like I guess. Mike/Jess and Whit/Cody, hopefully yall are good and still living. I'd love to hear from you some time. Eric, keep safe, I'll make up for the lack of Christmas present when you're stateside and I'm not a missionary. Mom, thanks for the updates on people last week. Grandpa Richards, thanks for your never failing weekly letters, I appreciate them. Anywho, I love you all and look forward to hearing back next week.