Rejoice evermore!

Hey, Mom! And anyone else who reads this!

I'm glad you had a good spring break, it sounds like there was a lot of fun had by all :). I'm especially missing settlers--it was recently decided that we can't play it, even on P-days, because apparently it would take too much time. It makes sense, I suppose.

For us, this week was good, although kind of slow. We had a lot of appointments cancel, which was disappointing--we even had some appointments cancel, re-set, and then cancel again, which was a little bit frustrating. But we made it work, and we found success in other ways, I think. For instance, when one potential investigator cancelled, after we'd already gotten a member to come with us and everything, we decided to bring the member (our Ward Mission Leader) to try and visit another potential investigator, although we were a little apprehensive about the chances of finding him home.

Well, we did, and we were able to teach him, and the Ward Mission Leader did a great job, and the guy seems really interested in learning more! And then afterwards, Hermano took us to Wendy's! So basically what I've learned is that on a mission, just like in "real life", there are things that are hard about every week (every day, even), and things that make it better.

Sunday was a little bizarre for us, too--it was fifth Sunday, so the men and women had class together, and the missionaries (eight of us) were left in charge of the primary. That was pretty crazy--I'd forgotten how much energy little kids can have.

Oh, another kind of crazy thing--our car is in the shop right now (apparently there was a like minuscule dent on it that had been there since before I came that the vehicle coordinator finally decided needed fixing), so we've been on bikes for the past few days! It's been kind of insane, and difficult, but we've been trying to get as many rides as we can, and pushing through. Hopefully we'll be getting the car back tomorrow, but for now, we're enjoying the increased visibility--last night at like 8:00, we were actually walking our bikes, because the wind was so strong that we didn't feel like biking uphill would be effective at all, and a member stopped his car, parked, and gave us $! So that was kinda really cool.

All in all, it's been a kind of hectic week, but good as well. I'm really looking forward to General Conference, that should be really awesome. I'm pretty sure I'll be watching Conference in English. There will be a broadcast at the chapel in English, and I think in some other rooms it will be in Spanish, so I'll probably be watching in English.

Mission trivia answers: 

I would say that probably 75% or more of the dinners we have are Mexican food. There are a couple of families that usually give us non-Mexican food, like this one where I believe the husband works at an Italian restaurant, so we usually have really good Italian food with them.

Most things have been pretty normal, from the point of view of Spanish culture I think. Probably the weirdest thing that was an option has been at dinner on Saturday, where we were offered pig feet, to put in our soup. None of the missionaries took it, so I assumed it wouldn't be bad to not take it. So that was kind of weird.

I don't really do too much budgeting, because I don't buy too much stuff. The only things we have to pay for are groceries, laundry, and like personal stuff. The mission pays for rent, utilities, gas, and other stuff like that. So that's nice. So most of the time I don't have to be too worried about money, it's mostly just like don't buy too much food, which isn't really a problem too much, because members feed us so much.

And yes, we do do stuff like (play soccer with other missionaries) occasionally, but not like super often, because we the Spanish missionaries live really far away from the other missionaries in our zone. But once a transfer, we have this thing called a zone P-day, where like everyone in the zone gathers up and does play sports or something. Not always soccer, but something. And then like last week the four of us Spanish elders played soccer together, and today we're going to go play soccer with some members of the ward.

As long as the senior companion has driving privileges, he drives. Driving is never really a split responsibility here, there's always one "designated driver."

My collection of ties has grown, but really only once, when my companion gave me a bunch of ties when he went home. So I do have more ties than I did when I left!

There's actually a member who does our laundry for us, which is really nice of her. So we don't even have to spend money on that!

In almost every ward there's a person who will give missionaries haircuts for free, so we go to her. But if we can't find someone like that, we'll go to somewhere like great clips. 

I love you all.

Love,

Peter

P.S. a couple of scriptures that I've found the past couple of weeks that I thought were just pretty awesome, and wanted to share:

1 Thessalonians 5:16 (the second shortest verse in the bible, also: awesome)

Jacob 6:12 (also awesome and short)