Well well well...I think I have another long letter for you guys again this week. I've been writing down lots of little random things that I've been forgetting to write about for the past few weeks, so this weeks letter might be full of random, but hopefully interesting things that have been on my mind.
But first, I will respond to the e-mail Mom sent. This might also be random too. I thought Dad's idea of hiding an egg in the fish tank was hilarious. Unfortunately I did not hide all my Easter eggs, I got too hungry one night and ate all the candy. It was all a delicious snack.
I am surprised at how many people here don't do family Easter egg hunts. Every time I asked people if they did an Easter egg hunt with their families they all said, no....we did go to that city Easter egg hunt, or a neighborhood Easter egg hunt. I always loved our Easter egg hunt.
I do get letters sometimes from friends that are on missions. My friend Joey who's in the Salt Lake City North mission writes me sometimes. Ryan Carreon wrote me (he's in McAllen Texas I think). I just found out my roommate from last year, Sam, is in France. Tony is doing good I think. I haven't heard from him in a while, but last I heard he was really close to leaving, so hopefully all is well.
Zak: The hermit/girls glove joke made me laugh and brought me back to when I was in Bro. Raddon's class. That was probably one of my most memorable and favorite memories about church. I was always excited to go to church because I wanted to hear the end of one of his stories from last week, or see if he would bring us mounds of candy or donuts. Hes an awesome guy. He took our quorum out fly fishing and did lots of fun stuff...unfortunately I had a soccer game during that fishing outing, but it would have been fun to go. Oh yeah, and the Arcadia Invitational track meet is actually a really famous track meet. A lot of people know about it. When I tell people about Arcadia, most people know it because of the track meet, our marching band, or because of the Arcadia mission.
Kylie: I am going to play softball today. Hopefully I'm good. My favorite part is batting...I don't like fielding that much. Most of the people I'm going to play with stink at softball though, so I will probably be good. Someone I'm teaching named Tom Fitchett use to be a professional softball catcher. He tells us stories every time we visit him about catching in the professional league and catching balls that were flying 110mph.
Quinn: The KKK is always interesting to learn about. There is a city down here that I've driven through a lot of times called Santa Fe which is where the KKK leader lives. A few years ago there was this story all over the news about how a black man came to Santa Fe to pump gas and these really bad, racist people grabbed him and tied him to the back of his truck and drove down the road dragging him. Its a pretty disgusting story. That road they drove down is called Highway 6 and I drive down it all the time. I tried to take a picture of the KKK guy's house as we were driving past, but I don't think its a very good picture. His house has all these crazy horse statues and weird stuff all over the front yard.
Ok....for Easter we ate dinner at the Randall's house. It was kind of a last minute thing because we had 2 dinner appointments that fell through at the last minute, but luckily the Randall's had a ton of food and they're super nice people so they invited us to eat with them. Wow...it was a good meal. We had honey baked turkey, honey baked ham, scalloped potatoes, all sorts of fruit, salad, and rolls. I ate a LOT. We have a ton left over so I'm going to be eating honey baked ham and turkey for the next week. I actually had some this morning.
On Saturday night we went to a less active member's home named Ricky Rich. He is a rapper from Louisiana. He doesn't really trust anyone and he usually doesn't let anyone into his home, but he's starting to trust us and he invited us to come in and dye eggs with his family. So of course we did. It was really fun and we got to meet his family and get to know them. The dye doesn't come off your fingers very easily, so I went to church the next day with green and blue fingers. It was pretty fun.
Here's some random facts about our area: I think I told you last week that knocking does not work well in this area. We've knocked almost every day for the past 6 weeks and we haven't found 1 good investigator. All of our investigators have been member referrals or they've seen the church and decided to come out on their own. That's actually the way its supposed to work, so its pretty neat, but knocking can get frustrating. We've been talking a lot to members about how we need their help in finding people and they've been awesome. I think I might have told you all that stuff already, but oh well. Our ward is really big. Each week we have over 300 people attend sacrament meeting. Yesterday we had 348. We cover portions of 3 different cities, so our area is huge. Most people here are attorneys or they work for the oil companies or they are accountants. The houses here are actually not expensive at all. The nice houses here all cost about $300,000. Here they have one of those set-ups where they have model homes and you choose a home and they build it on an empty lot for you. So everywhere they are basically 3 different types of houses. They cost either $160,000, $210,000, or $310,000. So housing is cheap here. This area is growing really fast though, so I'm sure priced will go up pretty fast within the next few years.
This area is really diverse too. Diverse in race and in religion. There are a lot of Muslim and Hindu people here. We cant really preach to the Muslim people because in a lot of their countries its legal to kill a person if they convert away from Islam. So pretty much every Muslim person avoids any sort of contact with us. We're actually teaching a Muslim guy right now, but I guess in his country (Bangladesh) its not so bad to change religions, plus hes never planning on going back there. Other than that, of course there are a LOT of baptist people, then there are catholic people. The Church of Christ is really big around here too.
Random stories:So..last week I saw some Bratwursts (basically big hot dogs) in Wal-Mart and I decided to buy them because I remember last year before a BYU football game someone made some and they were really good. I didn't really have any idea about how to cook them, but I knew I would figure it out. Well, on the back it gave you instructions on how to cook them. You could either cook them on the BBQ or in a skillet. I didn't know how to work the Randall's BBQ so I knew I had to cook it in the skillet. The only problem is that I had no idea what a skillet was. By the way, my companion bought some too, so we were both trying to figure this out. We looked in all the cupboards for something that looked like a "skillet." Well, soon Sister Randall came home and she saw us looking around for this skillet thing and so we turned around and asked her what the heck a skillet is. She laughed and laughed and told us its a frying pan. Well, now I know what a skillet is, but I have no idea why they don't just call it a frying pan.
Next story: I don't think I ever told you guys that I ran over a bird in Galveston. It was my very last week there. There are tons of annoying dumb birds there that nobody likes. I remember riding my bike past a fence where some birds were and the birds didn't fly away. As soon as I rode past I was like...wooow, I probably could have punched one of those birds if I wanted to. So since that day Me and my companion have joked about how dumb the birds were and how we could probably hit one on our bikes. So we would always swerve at the birds and they would always fly away at the last second. Well...a day or two before I left, there was a bunch of birds eating stuff in the grass and I swerved at the last second into the pack and rode right over a big pigeon. It still flew away but it was really dazed and couldn't fly straight. I actually ran over a bird on my bike! I don't know how many people can say they've done that.
More random things: So for lunch my favorite thing to cook is Tacos. I just brown some ground beef, put it in a tortilla, then put some cheese on and eat it. Its actually really good. Another thing I've just started to make is a breakfast burrito. I buy bacon, cook it up, then put in 4-5 eggs and scramble them. Then throw in the bacon, put it all in a tortilla and its a delicious breakfast burrito.
I remember before I left Dad taught me how to make omelets. I don't remember exactly how to do it, so I was wondering if Dad could e-mail me and remind me how to do it. I remember kind of how to do it, but I'm still not sure.
Lastly, thank you to Nana and to Mom for making the posts about my birthday. Christopher and Steven sent me a Thank-you card. It was a thank you for being born card apparently. I thought it was hilarious and it made me laugh a lot. Nana and Bumpa sent me a card, and also Grandma did. The Hix's sent me a card for Easter. I also got that letter from Mom with the print out of all the blog stuff. So I've had some pretty good mail.
Oh yeah, one more thing I had written down. Since my companion is from Tonga I've learned a lot of really interesting stuff about Tonga. I think I may have told you a lot about the things I learned in my first e-mail I sent after coming to Richmond. I know I said Tonga is mostly Mormon. like 60%ish. Well there's actually a law there where you cant work on Sunday. If you see someone mowing their lawn or something on Sunday, the cops will come and stop them. No stores or anything are allowed to be open on Sunday. Only the hospitals. If you need some medicine or something because someone is sick you just go to the hospital, because everything in the hospital is free. Rugby is the big sport there to play. Pretty much everyone plays it. My companion loooved rugby. He might come to BYU to play when he gets back. Hes going home on June 26.
Ok well that's about all. This was another loong e-mail, so I hope you all enjoyed it. I love you guys!!!
Love,
Chase
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