Received Mon, Nov 17 2008

This week has been another pretty good week.
We had 3 investigators at church again. Erica came again, and she brought her sister, Monique, her son, and Monique brought her two kids. The kids loved primary.

The thing that I've seen that most people like about our church is the families. Everyone always says that love seeing lots of children at church and they love it when they scream. At other churches they don't allow parents to bring their children and they don't care that much about family. Erica said she loved watching the families because when a kid would start screaming she would see the husband look at her wife and then roll his eyes and realize it was his turn to take the kid out to the foyer and he'd get up and do it. She loved how the husband and wife worked together and everything. I thought that was neat. The only problem with her is that she doesn't believe there is one true church. She believes that each person has a church that works for them and helps them be faithful to return to God again. She told us she wants to be a latter day saint and that she believes this is the church for her. We think that the reason why she has this belief is because she cares about her family a lot and her parents are pretty hardcore catholics and they're really good people. She can't accept the fact that her parents could be wrong. We're going to teach the Restoration lesson again and really focus on authority. We'll see how that goes.

We gave a baptismal date to Kim! She's the one who is the recent convert's daughter. Her scheduled baptismal date is November 29th. Hopefully everything goes smoothly until then. Most of her friends are pretty bad influences and shes trying to escape her old life. She used to be into drugs and all that stuff. She has her tongue and lip pierced...shes one of those punk rocker girls. She has changed a ton though. She went out to Sugar Land this weekend to visit her friend and her friends Mom and she brought Books of Mormon for them and she's excited to tell them about the church. We're still teaching Angie, who is the one who moved in with the another recent convert named Max. We have only taught her twice so far. Max is probably one of the biggest weirdo's I've ever met. He is definitely a little crazy. He use to be a drug dealer and he believes he saw a vision and saw a bunch of angels and stuff. He says he had almost the same experience as Joseph Smith. He had this experience while he was watching all 3 Lord of the Rings extended versions. He was clearly not sober and his mind was going crazy. He refers EVERYTHING we teach him to the Lord of the Rings or wrestling. He has all these crazy weird analogies. He says wrestling (like WWF wrestling you watch on TV) is all symbolic of Bible stories and stuff. Right now his plan is to become a favorite wrestler so he can share the gospel with everyone with his mask on, so nobody will know who he is. He's if he spreads the gospel to everyone without a mask then the people back in Houston will shoot him if they ever see him. We get all sorts of crazy stories when we go over there.

Oh yeah...so last week or whenever that was I didn't even realize the election was happening. I re-sent in my absentee ballot the day before the election thinking the election would be held in a few weeks. Apparently Obama is president now. Everyone here thinks the 2nd coming is near now. Everyone thinks he's a terrorist and an America hater. They're all angry that he didn't salute the flag or something. I'm a little skeptical just because he has hardly any experience. I don't think someone with so little experience is qualified to lead the nation. We'll see though. I'm not too afraid of him doing anything crazy because we aren't living in a monarchy or anything. That's why we have checks and balances. I'm not at all surprised he got elected though...this whole island pretty much voted for him. A lot of black people voted for the first time so they could have a black person be president, so I'm sure that happened all throughout the south. They're all pretty happy about it around here though. We're already starting to hear comments from black people like, "Obama is president, I can do whatever I want." It's kind of funny.

Me and Elder Pedersen have picked up a little hobby over the last couple of weeks. As we ride down the sea wall every night we ride past a lot of the same hobo's, so we decided to start naming them. We named the one who is always shoeless Shoeless Joe Jackson. He is always sitting on a bench meditating. We named the scruffiest, most hobo-like one Hobo Jones. The coolest one is named Dexter. Whenever we ride past him he always yells, I LOVE LATTER DAY SAINTS!! and stuff like that. We named him Dexter because he sounds like a really educated person when he speaks, but he's definitely a hobo. Then one day we actually saw him riding around on a segway. We have NO idea how he got a hold of one, but we haven't seen him since then. He must have escaped with it. I'm sure he'll be back.

I finished putting all the pictures on a flashdrive and put captions on them all, so I'm going to send that home today. You should be able to open it on mom's computer and open it with the Windows Picture viewer or whatever its called...I don't know. Its the picture viewing program that comes with vista...I wrote the captions on there, so if you open it with that you should be able to see them. You can figure it out.

This last week I thought that I should start taking pictures of some of the crazy painted houses here, because I know Mom would be fascinated by them. Almost nobody paints their house a normal color. The most common color is lime green. Some houses paint each window or each area a different random bright color, its pretty funny to see. I haven't taken any pictures yet, but I should before I leave.

I got those two packages with the pictures and stuff in it. I thought it was hilarious. I took that picture of CJ and STC and showed it to the Browns (the old people we live with) and just said, These are my two brothers! He (brother brown) didn't believe they were my brothers and he asked who these two weirdo's were. I thought it was hilarious. After messing around with him some more I finally told him it was just for Halloween.

I am shocked to hear Dad beat me this week on fantasy football. I'm also honestly surprised that I'm doing so good when the Chargers are doing so bad. Oh yeah, so this week is the BYU Utah game. Elder Pedersen asked president if we could watch the 4th quarter of the game if we go visit a less active member who is watching the game. President said no, it was worth a try. He'll be calling in 1-800-555-TELL though to get the scores I'm sure. But tell me how that one goes.

OK I'm sure I've already asked this question before, but if I need to buy something should I use my debit card or credit card??Alright well I've got to go now! There are only two weeks left in this transfer, its going by so fast! Alright well I'll talk to you all later!

Love,
Chase

P.S.
I just sent me e-mail and when it closed I saw mom's question about how I got to Texas City. The sister missionaries come and pick us up every day at about 11 and we drive to Texas city to e-mail, shop, and go bowling or do whatever we planned. Ok, great stories this week. The sandwich story made me laugh out loud. And I want to hear how CJ's MLS game went. I've always wondered if those would be fun. Ok bye!Love,Chase