Email 3/20/13

Hey sorry I forgot to write in my last email, that Monday wasn't going to be our P-day this week. It was our Zone's turn to have a temple trip, and so we got to do that this morning, and they just made today our P-day instead of Monday. Things have been going better, well things got worse, but I've been able to handle a lot of pretty crazy stuff and quite a bit of drama, this past week with a good attitude, so it doesn't seem as bad. If people are wondering why I haven't been writing you back it's because I haven't been getting letters. Somebody crossed out our address on the stickers that they put on our mail to forward to our apartments and put a different number. So some of it went to this other guy, and I'm guessing the rest of them got returned, so if you get it returned please just resend it, and it will get to me. So if you haven't found out by now, I'm obsessed with nice ties, (Stacy Adams are my favorite) and so it's been hard to not buy a lot of ties considering missionaries aren't made of money. Our AP has this thing with his ward and family where if they send him a tie in the mail, he'll send them a picture back of him wearing it in return. He even has an announcement like that in his ward bulletin, we should get one of those for me! haha. I can't get enough of the classy ties.

Temple Trip - Elders: Werner (companion), Escamilla, Bell, Clark, and Garfield

The weather here has been crazy this past week! It was in the 80's, and then it went up to the 100's and now it's back down to the 70's! It's super crazy. It was a hot couple days when it was up in the hundreds. It's still winter is what is the crazy thing! I was worried about the winters here having snow in the mountain areas because I wanted to get away from snow for a while, but I'm starting to wish it would snow instead of getting that hot in the winter. The summer is just going to kill me!

How hot was your winter?

We had a day this week that was really good for tracting. I had been thinking of the streets we hadn't tracted yet, so we went to 10th street and tracted it for about a half hour. The first six houses we went to, we got five return appointments. Unfortunately three of them were referrals for the Spanish missionaries, but it was crazy how many people on that street were interested! We also had a cool tracting experience with a youth member of our ward tracting with us. He was supposed to come to a lesson with us but it fell through so we just took him tracting with us. As soon as we got done praying the street Wabash popped right into my head, and so we went there. We had started on the first house, but saw somebody like 3 houses down walking out to their car and so I went over to him and skipped the other houses. His name is Gio, the member we brought asked him what school he goes to, which we would have never thought about asking, and he goes to a school and is like best friends with somebody Elder Werner had baptized a year ago. Gio was way pumped about meeting with us, I was on exchanges that day with the zone leaders, but they said they had a great first lesson with him. We went over a couple days later to follow up with him and he had read 15 pages of the Book of Mormon already. I'm really excited to work with him. I'm glad we brought that member, because if we hadn't he might not have met with us not knowing his best friend was a member.

We have been helping the little league baseball fields prepare for their season. Our zone probably worked with them once a month maybe twice a month doing service on their fields and snackbar. I don't remember if I wrote about this or not, but me and a couple other Elders repainted their whole clubhouse about a month ago. They had opening day this week and we got asked to come over and do service. When we got there it was like a carnival, they had face paint, games, a blow up house, and cotton candy and snow cones. Elder Clark and I ended up working in the cotton candy and snow cone area and it was a bunch of fun. We were there for six hours it was such a nice day and nice to help out other people get their calories on haha. Before it all started we got to jump in the bounce house and mess around it was pretty fun. During the whole thing we got unlimited snow cones and cotton candy which is really delicious and addicting. I didn't realize how good cotton candy was until Saturday! We both switched off, but mostly it was Elder Clark doing the cotton candy and I was doing the snow cones. All of my experience working at Snowie finally payed off! haha. The cotton candy was really messy and they had us come in our Proselyting clothes. I don't know why, but luckily I didn't spill on myself. They also had a competition at who could throw the fastest, and the missionaries got to do it for free, but couldn't win the prize because it was a movie gift card. I ended up throwing the fastest out of all the missionaries at 74 mph with a baseball, and 71 mph with a softball haha.

Elders Clark & Bell having way too much fun in the bounce house

Making cotton candy at the carnival

The Elders really felt the spirit in this house

Elder Escamilla and I were companions in the MTC, ward-mates out here in the field, but we have never been in the same district before, so we have never gotten to go on exchanges and work together. We are finally in the same district this transfer and we got to go on exchanges. It was so much fun. We were on bikes, and oh man that is tough. My thighs and legs were burning that entire day. It made me really appreciate having a car. Elder Clark's bike seat is awful, my butt got really sore too, I was whining the whole day haha. But besides the fact we were on bikes and rode up some big hills, it was really fun and Elder Escamilla and I had a good time being companions again.

We got some new roommates at our apartment! :) We actually got kicked out and they are running the apartment. Sunday night I found a nice little friend sitting on the top of my bed. It explains why we've been so itchy, and the random blood stains on our sheets. Yup. We have bed bugs. Pretty awesome haha, just kidding. We had been getting bites and been itchy for the past couple of days. And we joked around about having bed bugs, but never thought we actually had them haha. The next day we washed our sheets and blankets and put them in bags and then called the housing missionaries and they came over and we discovered a bunch of them under our box springs. We looked up online that 120 degrees will kill them so we went around the edges and border of our mattress' and box springs and they would come running out. We ended up using our pass along cards and scooped up all that we could. It was pretty gross. We then had to take all of our clothes whether they were clean or dirty and had to wash them all. We had to throw away our pillows, which made me sad because my pillow was very comfy! I wrote "bed bugs" in sharpie on our pillows because homeless people dumpster dive at our place daily so hopefully they won't take them. I warned them so it's not my fault if they get bed bugs! We moved out and we are now living with our ward-mates. Which will be really fun the nights we have to stay in if we don't have appointments. All four of us have a guitar and so we all like to play together. If we start to get distracted from the work, I'm going to see if we can live with a member until our place gets done getting fumigated. I love our ward-mates and we have a lot of fun, but I'm worried we'll get distracted from going out to work, or even during our studies. We'll probably be out of our apartment for about 2-3 weeks.

A bed bug

Some of the captured bed bugs

There is this mountain that overlooks our whole area called little mountain, and this last week one night we went out and drove to the top with our guitars and had a little jamming session. We're not very good, or in sync with each other at all, so it didn't sound very good but it was still pretty fun. I want to start to play or at least start learning how to play church hymns. I think that would be really cool to learn. I'm not sure if I'm good enough yet though.

Jammin' on Little Mountain

Elder Bell's (highly anticipated) first album cover

I got a package from mom that had a tie in it, she didn't want me to wear... but I did anyways! :) Don't worry I didn't wear this tie outside our apartment. I wanted to start out the tie thing with this tie, if you send me a tie... I'll send you a picture of me wearing it in return! haha. I hope everybody has a good week. I love hearing from everybody so keep those letters coming!

Elder Bell's most recent "classy" tie - a St. Patrick's Day "Beer Tie" from Mom

Love,
Elder Landon Bell