July 9, 2017

up your game

I reflected back on the good old days when I was getting bit by dogs and finding ant nests in my clothes and wondering why nothing hilarious like that has been happening lately. So yeah, this last week was my first in the Redlands Bay area. It's definitely my smallest so far, but it's still a ward. Oh yeah, and before I forget, we celebrated a birthday this last week. The birthday of the greatest county in the world. 󾓦🗽🎉

We didn't get to do much for it other than singing a stirring rendition of "America the Beautiful" for comp study. There's a lot of people to visit here. Plus the members are awesome. One night we made homemade pizza, that was really cool. We have an investigator Lachlan, who's only 16 or 17 but he's really excited to get baptized and wants to serve a mission and all. We're excited, he's excited, the ward is excited because everyone knows him, and even his parents are excited even though they're not members and aren't even interested in joining (yet). But we taught the Plan of Salvation with his parents there and it went really well. He's already been taught everything (his baptism is this week) but we're reteaching everything with his parents so they know about what we believe.

Highlight of the week FO SHO was going to the islands. We have a couple islands in our ward boundaries because our area is right on the coast, so we have permission to take a ferry out to them every other week or so to visit less actives. I thought all the fancy rich people would live on the islands, but actually it's where all the boguns live (think: Australian hillbillies) and they're really fun to talk to because they'll talk to you about anything, especially fishing.

We started on Macleay island and visited this one lady who asked us if we wanted her to show us her chooks, and she asked me if I knew what a chook was, and I was like LADY, I've been in Aussie land for 16 MONTHS now, I'm practically STEVE IRWIN at this point....not really but I already knew they were chickens. We had to bike HARD around the islands (that's the catch, we don't get to take the car) because we needed to catch the ferry. Then we went to Lamb island and visited another less active. We sort of helped him remove some old blinds and start to install some new ones but only got so far before we had to dash back to the port. I say sort of because we almost stripped a screw so bad we couldn't get it out of the wall but couldn't screw it any further. But fortunately we got it out and kind of left it half installed.

He showed me this super ancient image capturing photograph machine (a camera) and told be to find the "secret latch" to open the lens. There was a button on the back and I just thought "oh, easy" and pressed it but instead of doing what I thought it would it just kind of broke. It was like that part in Nacho Libre where he pokes the china doll and the eye just shatters, except it was with this button on the back of this old camera. He didn't get mad thought or anything. I think he might have been too old to get mad anymore.

Sunday was great to, we had a stake priesthood meeting and there were some really awesome talks, one was about how the Aaronic priesthood are like the "wingmen" to the bishop, another was about the importance of serving a full time mission, and another was about what we can learn about priesthood service from Melchizedek. Overall great week and this week will be exciting too.

Elder Cummings