Ducks and a Library Card

Dear family and friends,

           I NO LONGER HAVE TO SHARE TIME WITH MY COMPANION ANYMORE! I HAVE A LIBRARY CARD AND IT FEELS SOOOOO COOL! Now you won't have to worry about me only writing letters to Ryan anymore. Okay so first things first I bet you're all wondering what my new area's like outside of what I've already told you. Well for starters there are a lot of ducks. Seriously there's a long lake that runs through a good deal of my area and there are several man-made waterfalls. There are so many bodies of water around here which attract a considerable number of water fowl into the area. In plain English: There are a lot of random ducks. Seriously they just walk everywhere in urban neighborhoods. It's really cool to watch! I've never seen so many ducks before in one area. I had to get a picture. There are also plenty of pelicans too. There's a college in my area and there are a lot of college students in one of the wards I serve in. That's a big reason for the ducks and there are even fish too in the parts of the river that run near the college campus and the apartments where the students live. 

            Oh on Wednesday we had a dinner appointment with the Hernandez family. Brother Hernandez practices Hrong Won Do, the original martial art that Tae Kwon Do came from. I apologize for the spelling since I don't know how the martial art is spelled. Anyway he has a really cool sword that he let me hold on to. It rocked! I told him that I'm a second degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do and we had a nice long conversation about the two martial arts. Good times. That same night we had another dinner appointment at our ward mission leader's house. The reason why we had dinner there is because we originally had an appointment with an investigator of ours that has a baptismal date for June 11th named Ricky but Brother Crabtree decided to change it to a dinner appointment. Well I hate rescheduling appointments, especially when we're teaching an investigator with a date so Elder Ware and I said sure, forgetting that we already had a dinner appointment for earlier that day so we had two dinners on Wednesday. Our stomachs were HUGE by the end of that day. At least Ricky got Lesson 2 taught to him.

             Ricky's doing great right now. The funny thing was that he came to us. We met him on my first Sunday here in Glendale North (which is the name of my new area). He went to the wrong ward, but that's okay. He said he had a friend who was a member of the church and that he'd been looking for religion for a long time. We took him on a church tour, set a baptismal date for June 11th, and ever since then we've been teaching him. We have a lot of standing visits with people, but we've had to drop them since they don't progress. Last week we dropped two investigators and we got ditched by a girl we thought was going to be golden. I guess I'd call her "fool's gold". Anyway it's a little discouraging but we're trying to set up some more baptismal dates with people.

             So I've gotten to know Elder Ware a little bit better and I have more informationabout him that I think you'd all like to hear.  For starters he hates musicals and live theater in general. His favorite kind of cheese is pepper jack cheese, he took a sign language class in high school but hated his teacher (according to him nobody liked her). He sold his Jeep to come out here. He likes Jeeps and trucks. I'm the fourth companion he's had. He has no interest in watching the Matrix and he doesn't like The Lord of the Rings. Basically he's way different than Elder Bell, who loved musicals and watching TV. Elder Ware says that he wants to have six kids (4 boys and 2 girls) and if he gets a lot of girls he'll keep trying until he gets at least one boy. He also wants to "deck out" an old cop car and ride around in it. His voice is mono-tone and he still doesn't know what he wants to do with his life. He loves mexican food (authentic Mexican food he says but he also likes Taco Bell) and his favorite restaurant is Panda Express. He hates pineapple. Elder Ware was less active and he came back to church because the young men in his ward invited him back to mutual and that's basically how he came back to the church.

             Keep praying for us. We need more people to teach. We tract a lot but we do get fed a lot since one of our wards still uses the dinner calendars. It's helpful in getting to know the members and I don't have to spend as much money in general. I love you all and I'm so glad I can e-mail you again.

Love,

Elder Boothe