Received Mon Nov 3, 2008

This week as been a pretty crazy week. But I guess that's not really unusual for me.

Hmm...where should I start. Lets see...we have been having a really hard time with our bikes. There are nails and thorns all over Galveston right now, so we have been getting flat tires all the time. Tuesday Elder Pedersen had two holes in his tires so we patched that up.

Then on Tuesday evening we planning an awesome day with backup plans and everything. We were pretty excited about it. Then at like 10:32, Elder Brown (the senior missionary were living with) knocked on our door and told us that we needed to do service tomorrow at the church and help clean out this shed to store all the tools or something. We were already in bed and everything, but we had to throw out our plans and just do it. He said it was probably a two hour job. Nope, we didn't finish until like 4pm. Then we had to go to a member's house and help them replace a huge hole in their ceiling. So we didn't get to go out that day.

Then the next day Elder Pedersen had a leadership meeting out in Sugar Land. The zone leaders came and picked us up and drove to their apartment in a place called Friendswood. There all the district leaders carpooled to Sugar Land for the meeting. The zone leaders gave me the key to their apartment and said I was going to work their area with a brand new missionary who had just come in like a week before. I knew about these plans like a day or two in advance so it wasn't a huge surprise. So we did our studies there and I took the new missionary out and we knocked doors. This was a tough area...everyone was either rich and thought they had everything already or they were old and said they were set in their ways. It was really fun though. I got to try out all different kinds of door approaches and find out what works. It was also kind of fun to be the senior companion for the day. I really learned a lot from having to being the senior comp. That took pretty much the whole day and by the time we got back to our apartment it was too late to go out and work in our own area.

Then Friday morning morning we woke up, studied, and went to get our bikes to go out but I saw my tire was totally flat and had a huge nail sticking in it along with like 4 thorns. We used all of our patches to fix it. So we go back out again to get ready to go and I see my front tire is totally flat too. We had no more patches and the only Walmart is like 65 blocks away. We were pretty much stranded. We had a district meeting to go to, and luckily the sisters picked us up in our car and took us there.

President Allred was there to do interviews and he heard about our problems and he just gave me some money and told one of the assistants to take me to wal-mart to buy more patches and a new intertube. So to fast forward things, we did that patched it all up and it was dark so we couldn't go out for a 3rd day in a row. We had a bunch more things happen and more flat tire problems, but its all long and boring stories that wont be very interesting to tell, but our bikes are all fine now.

I've got one more bike story. So finally that next day we got to go out again and I was determined to talk to a ton of people and make up for our missing 3 days. We got on our bikes and started riding along Seawall to contact a referral that was 38 blocks away. I was riding as hard as I possibly could, but I felt like my bike was made out of lead weights. I wasn't going nearly as fast as I should have been. I just kept riding harder and harder until we finally got there. I was sweating hard and this was the first time I was actually really tired from riding my bike in Texas. I got off my bike and noticed something weird about my back tire. I tried to spin it and it barely moved. When I had put on my back tire, somehow my brakes got tightened and they were squeezing against my tire the whole time. So I rode 38 blocks with my brakes on! My thighs were so tired I could barely walk up the stairs to the house. My bike felt really nice for the rest of the day though...pedaling is much easier when you aren't riding around with your brakes on.

Aside from those 3 off days we did amazing this week. We've been praying hard to find people because we have almost nobody to teach and we have been working hard. Because of that we have been so blessed. We have literally had people yell out to us and call us over and tell us that they use to get taught by the missionaries, then lost contact and they had been wanting to get involved with the church again. That happened with like 3-4 people. We were just always in the right place at the right time. We found tons of people every day. By the end of the week we had found 15 new investigators. When we called in to report our numbers they told us we found the most investigators in the whole mission! We didn't even get to work for 3 of those days. It has been really awesome. I'm really excited for these next couple weeks to follow up with these people and teach the people who are really sincere about learning more. I don't know if I told you but only 2 people have been baptized in our area in this past year. We really want to change that. So that's pretty much how my week went!

It sounds like everything's going well at home. I definitely miss having that In N Out truck for Halloween parties. We came in early on Halloween for obvious reasons. Strangely, there were barely any trick-or-treaters around here this year. I guess its because so many houses were destroyed that people assumed it wouldn't work out too well. Its also not exactly the best place to be letting your kids walk around at night time. The crime is pretty bad in Galveston...its a pretty shady place, especially now with looters around.

No I did not remember the time change. Our stupid cell phones didn't automatically change the time. We have Sprint phones...they're stupid. We did remember before we left the apartment though. We just went back to sleep for an hour. There were 3-4 people who showed up at church an hour early though, that was pretty funny.

Moms Questions:Things are going great with my companion. We both want to bring success to this area and were working hard. Were also having a lot of fun, which I've found is really important if you want to be a good, happy missionary.

We don't regularly do service anymore, but it seems like about once a week they tell us they need us to do service for the day. We don't see very many yellow shirters anymore. Pres Allred is only sending 4 missionaries a day now. We've helped over 600 houses though and I figured that I've personally helped out 50-60 houses. We definitely got pretty good exposure.

We rarely get dinner appointments. MAYBE one a week. Since eating that nasty Indian food that made me throw up 5 times we have had 2 dinner appointments. And the senior missionaries never make food for us. I think they're kind of poor so I never ask them for anything. Plus they eat old people food filled with fiber and all kinds of other nasty stuff, so I'm kind of glad they don't make us anything.

No we haven't tracted in our own apartment complex. We have been visiting people who we have done service for. This is one of our most useful finding tools. Its pretty hard to reject us when our church spent a day doing service for them. By the way...we heard that tree chopping companies are charging like $1000 dollars to take out a good sized tree from yards and they're charging several thousand to gut out houses. We do that stuff all day long.

We don't really have plans for P-day this week. Last week we went bowling. I am planning on sending home some pictures today though. I just put all the pictures on a CD this time...it was the easiest and probably cheapest thing to do. I still have all those pictures on my camera so if you have questions about the pictures just ask me and I'll let you know. In the future I want to put the pictures on the flash drive with the Brown's laptop and I can actually write in captions to the pictures on the computer. I couldn't this time because the CD is not a re-writable CD, its a CD-R not a CD-RW, so you cant change anything on it once its been made. That seemed like a really good idea to me.

Church was good. We have only been having sacrament meeting for the English ward and the Spanish branch. The rest of the church is filled with supplies and stuff so they cant have class. Next week we'll have normal church. I'll tell you our crazy Sunday schedule for church next week.

I'm going to be excited to get that stuff you sent Mom...that's all exactly what I've been needing. And yeah it takes a week and sometimes a little more to get mail here. It gets sent to the mission office then they send it out here with whoever happens to be coming out here within the next week. Sometimes nobody comes out for a while though, so it takes a while. I do love the things you send though. Elder Pedersen saw our fantasy football stuff and he said he wants to do that when he gets back from his mission. He's heard of it before but nobody has ever explained to him what it is.

Jake got his mission call...that's awesome!! I'm glad to hear Jeff is doing well still too. Ive been pretty worried about that situation.Ok, this was a pretty packed e-mail...next week I'll have to include some more stories and random things that have happened to us during the week.

I love you all!
Love,
Chase