April 25, 2016

This week we went on exchanges. I stayed here in our area for the 3rd exchange in a row. Elder Norris came to our area from Molalla. He is a really odd cookie so it was a painful 24 hours. On Saturday morning we got to go see a Joseph smith historian. He was an interesting guy and he had a bunch of artifacts we could look at. It was cool. He told a story about Joseph smith I don't remember ever hearing before. All the people were living in a swampy area and there was a malaria outbreak. Almost everyone was sick. Then he healed everyone. His point in sharing the story was that we shouldn't make Joseph smith seem like an ordinary guy because he wasn't. He performed miracles, he saw God and Jesus Christ, and he restored the true church to the earth. 

I told Elder Goodrich that never before on my mission has someone pointed to their no soliciting sign and slammed the door. A few minutes later it happened three times in a row. Then the next day it happened again. So I'm never saying anything like that again. I hit 7 months yesterday so that was cool. Time is flying. I've been out 7 months, but it only feels like 7 months! Haha. 

Another cool thing that happened. You may have read previously that we have a ton of stray cats around the duplex. So I have been tormenting them in many ways. For example, shooting them with darts that have thumbtacks in the end, poking them with sticks, poking them with my iPad, grabbing their tails and tossing them, I tried to spear one with a knife taped to the end of a stick, and I always sneak up on them and scare them. So they aren't very friendly to us. They see our car pull up and they run away... So we have been trying to gain back their trust so that we can betray them and kill them. An investigator gave us this canned tuna so we have been feeding them. But I didn't want to wait to gain their trust so I put some on our balcony and left the sliding door open. Then I concealed myself with a blanket and lied in wait. The cat came up and was eating the tuna and I jumped out and tried to catch it. I failed. So now they are very hesitant to eat food from us too. 

Another funny story. Elder Goodrich is the district leader so he has to call the people in our district on Sunday night. This time I called the sisters and was messing with them pretending to be elder Goodrich. They new it was me though. Whenever we text them or call them if it's serious they know it's elder Goodrich. If it funny or weird they assume it was me. Which is true. Anyway one thing led to another and they said they need a blender so we said we would give them ours since we never use it. I wanted to put it to use one more time so I made a will it blend video with an orange, a tie, and a thing of Vaseline I found in our cupboard which is weird. I think the blender might be broken though.

That's all I got for ya. Have a great week.

Love,

Elder Garfield