It did rain on Sunday...

Hey! Happy President's Day to you as well!

It's great to hear that everything is going well in Oregon, that the snow's melted, and that things are getting back to as normal as is possible.

And, it sounds like the Olympics are going well, and that you're all having fun watching them--it's pretty bizarre over here, we really haven't heard anything about them. I guess the Spanish members aren't as interested in the Winter Olympics as I am :).

So, this week was pretty good. We weren't able to teach as much as last week, but we did some good work, and were able to find some new people to teach that hopefully we'll be able to follow up with this week.

Things were slowed down a little bit over the weekend by my companion suddenly falling ill, which made it so we couldn't do a ton of work either Saturday or Sunday. We were able to work for about an hour both days, although we were also able to make it to a service project on Saturday--it was the one, if you remember, where we go to retirement homes and sing songs to seniors, which was pretty great. On Sunday, we weren't even able to make it to church, which was sad, but it was okay, a couple of members were able to bring us the sacrament, which was very nice of them.

But so aside from the whole sickness thing, we were able to get quite a bit done. The family we're focusing the most on right now is really good friends of a family in the ward who introduced them to the church. They're super great, are really eager to learn more about the gospel, and are reading together in the Book of Mormon, which is super cool. There are two boys, ages 12 and 10, who we're also teaching, and then they also have a 4(?) year-old daughter, who's hilarious. The ten-year-old is super good at drawing, at least cartoon characters, so he's been drawing characters from Adventure Time and Regular Show for us. We're really trying to emphasize the importance of coming to church with them, because, while they've been super open and friendly (I mean, they had us over for dinner on Friday, for goodness' sake), they haven't been able to make it to church yet, and we really don't know why.

To find new people to teach, we've mostly been going through the area book, which is like the record of all the missionary work that's gone on in that area in the past five years or so, and identifying people who were at one time interested in the gospel, and then tracking them down. So far, it's brought at least some success--we were able to teach one former investigator last week, and set up appointments for this week with a few more.

Oh, and then yesterday, on P-day, we had our "zone p-day", which is the one P-day set apart of the transfer that we're allowed to hang out as a zone, because normally we aren't allowed to hang out with sisters on P-day, because stupid missionaries in the past have done stupid things, I guess. But so that was a lot of fun--we played soccer, kickball, ultimate, and just generally had a good time. It's kind of bizarre--I left this zone only like 9 weeks ago, and then came back 2 weeks ago, and there are so few missionaries that are still here. I think there are like 5 still here from when I was in the Zone last time, out of the something like 25 missionaries.

We have zone P-days at different places, depending on things like the weather. Normally, we'd have it in a church building, but yesterday, it was warm enough for us to have it at a park. It took us a while to get to from here, but it was a lot of fun. It's pretty crazy, although at times like these, you have to remember that two weeks ago, the temperature was below zero. Apparently winter extends like into April here, so that's something to look forward to.

It did rain on Sunday, which was, I think possibly the first time I've seen it rain while I've been here in Colorado. Bizarre.

Oh, I completely forgot, we had Zone Conference this Wednesday, which was great. The main focus of the training we got from President Toombs was making sure that everyone we teach has a correct understanding of who God really is. It was great--I think a lot of the time we just skim over that, but the knowledge of who God the Father is is so integral to our faith that we can't afford to let it slip by when we're teaching someone. It was a pretty great reminder. Sometimes it's good to just go back to the basics--that Heavenly Father loves us, and then everything else goes back to that.

Tomorrow we get to go to the Temple, so that should be really great. I'm looking forward to it, but maybe not the part where we have to get up at 4:30 in the morning to make it there on time. But it should be great!

Love,

Peter