The Great Outhouse Caper

Hello!

And thus, it came to pass that Steve Jobs passed away, and there was great mourning in all the land. Was anyone else super bummed that day? Man he was like a decent human being that didn't get into trouble, and that's pretty sad. Don't know what's going to happen to Apple now though.

We had an alright week over here in Good ol Sanford. It was Columbus day or something so our P-day got moved. And I didn't even realize it was Canadian Thanksgiving until someone pointed it out to me. An American had to tell me. That's probably not good.

We had our interviews this week which was pretty cool. President Anderson does it differently than President Pfile, it took a lot longer to do. It was good though, being able to just sit down and talk about whatever you wanted with the mission president. We had a little trainers meeting as well, and there is only 2 trainers in the valley right now so it was a good chance to ask the AP's questions and report on what's going on. Me and Elder Park have really loved the program, because even though we don't have really any investigators we get lots of practice role playing, which helps out Elder Park a lot. He's coming along great. He's such a diligent studier and has a lot of focus. He said the MTC was a piece of cake because in his high school he basically went to school all day and studied all day. They even had school on Saturday in Korea. And here in Sanford, they have every Friday off! Hey that's something to suggest to the school board right?

We got to teach Seminary twice this week. It was Elder Park's first time in a Seminary Classroom. Because he's a convert of 3 years and he's 24, didn't really ever do that. One time we got a phone call at 6:10 am saying, hey, can you teach seminary this morning?" That was fun! It's good though because we get to be with the youth a bit and talk about missionary work and stuff.

Our idea to implement family history as a finding idea is working fairly well. A lot of people who really don't like to talk about the gospel with us are opening up about family History. We gotta go follow up with some people, but for the most part it's important to people. You get some dumb teenagers occasionally who have no interest in anything. This one door approach I gave to Elder Park, all pumping him up like "ya, this is going to be super awesome! Baptism!" and then these 2 teenage girls answered the door and they made it super awkward for Elder Park and he didn't know what to do or say. But that was alright, live and learn.

And one morning during our studies, the most unusual thing happened. There were some cars going around the dirt in front of our house, and beside it and we couldn't figure out what was going on. They had a truck with a cattle trailer on it and they stopped just beside our house. And then it hit me. One interesting American tradition is something called "Homecoming" where they have sports, a bonfire, and people dressing up as royalty and stuff. Well many moons ago, someone had said to us "watch out, they like to steal outhouses around homecoming". Well, alas, they stole our outhouse! I liked that outhouse! We went outside and helped them load it up in the cattle trailer (bear in mind, this outhouse was built in the 1930's during the great depression. It was pretty well unusable and was probably a health hazard) and it was the most curious experience, hanging on to an outhouse in the back of a cattle trailer with several youth hanging on to the sides of the trailer to keep the doors from swinging around, driving down main street. I can confidently say I have never done that before, and will probably never do it again. They won the football game too. So there.

It's been an ok week. Someone forgot to pass around our dinner calendar so we've been fasting the past few weeks a bit. Naw, but definetely being creative. Elder Park makes the rice, and I put ranch on it! Oh ranch, how I love you. Lots of member role plays, and we are having lots of tender mercies to make up for the lack of successes. Some come in the form of missionary things, and others just nice little things. Like an outhouse caper. Boy it was cold this week. Got down to like 22F. I had to break out the winter gear. Next week should be good, we got a lot of things lined up.

Well my time is up! we shall pick up where we left off next week!

LOVE
Elder Gibb