Received Tue, Jan 19, 2010

Dear Family,

I’ll start off with the whole driver’s license thing. I’m glad you remembered because I totally forgot about all that stuff. If I do get something in the mail, maybe it would just be easier if one of you signed my name on the paper for me and sent it in. I don’t know how that would work or if it would work, but I thought I’d throw it out there.

I only have a couple things written down for this week. Its been mostly the same stuff going on. But I do have a couple things. The first one is about the show Extreme Home Makeover…I think that’s what its called. I know you know what it is. Well they are doing one of those houses here in Kemah, which is right by League City. I guess there is some family here and they take in all these foster kids. They’ve had like 20 something kids go through their home and they’ve adopted a lot of them…like 8 or 9. Several of them have disabilities too. Their house got destroyed last year by the hurricane and they haven’t had any money to fix it, so they have been living in FEMA trailers. So Extreme Home Makeover came in and built a massive house for them. It is the biggest house they’ve built on the show. Its something like 8 bedrooms and they have an elevator in the middle of the house so the kids with disabilities can go up and down. We stopped by to see the house. There were toooons and tons of volunteers there. I’d say probably 80% of them were standing around and they’d pick something up every once in a while and give it to one of the few contract workers who knew what they were doing. They really did work on it 24 hours a day though. I think that episode goes on the air in March or something.

You will never guess what I did for some service this week. We mucked out a house! I never thought that over a year after the hurricane I would muck out another house. Apparently some lady finally got cleared by her insurance to muck everything out, so I guess she knew a member and the member sent us to go help her. It was a lot more fun when everything wasn’t saturated in sewage water. The insulation was nasty though…I did not go near that stuff. It was black. It was fun to smash in the walls and tear everything apart though. It brought back a lot of memories.

The only other really eventful, out of the ordinary thing I remember from this week is that on Sunday I got to interview a family of 4 for baptism. Baptismal interviews are always fun to do. You get to hear first hand about all these people’s conversions. All of them are amazing too. Everyone had to overcome some pretty significant things whether it be family issues, friends, word of wisdom issues, or whatever else. Its probably one of my favorite parts in the mission.

I bought myself a little Christmas present yesterday. I’ve started to try to do exercises in the morning again and I decided that I’m just going to do pushups in the morning. I want to do 100 push ups every morning. I honestly didn’t think I would be able to do more than 15 pushups without stopping right now, but I was and I did a couple sets of 20. I’ve been doing about 85 pushups in the morning. Anyway, sometimes it hurts my wrists to do pushups on the ground and some missionaries have these things called Perfect Pushups that they use and I’ve used them before and I liked them, so I decided to use some Christmas money to buy them. They are those things you see ads for on the TV that were designed by some navy seal or something and basically all it is, is that you spin your wrists 90 degrees as you do the pushup and it works more muscles and takes the stress off you tendons. We’ll see how those work. They are small so it will be easy to just throw in my suit case.

This is the last week of the transfer! So that means next week I will have transfer news. Now I will be veeery surprised if I get transferred, but you never know. Everyone has been moving around a lot lately. My companion has been in this area for like 6 months, so he could go at any time. I am pretty sure I will go back to Spanish sometime, but my guess is that will be in 2 more transfers. Speaking of that, it has been really cool to see how my Spanish has not gotten worse at all. If anything it has gotten better. I see Spanish people throughout the week, so I always take the opportunity to go talk to them. It doesn’t feel like I’m rusty at all. Plus I’ve been handing out about an average of 1-2 referrals to the Spanish Elders every week, so that makes them happy. And today I am on exchanges in one of the Spanish areas, so that is fun. And all the interviews I do are in Spanish. I’ve done about 6-7 interviews this transfer, so that is always fun.

We are still searching for people to teach in our area. We have been hitting our goal of each talking to at least 10 people every day and we finally found a person or 2 who actually might be interested. We have return appointments this week, so we’ll see how it goes.

Well, as always it was awesome to hear the updates from home. And yes I am back to full health. And I bought some hand sanitizer, so I need to start using that stuff again. It always seems like there is something going around in every house we go into. And Bub, you should start that Driver’s Ed. You should just do it online like I did. I would just put on some music and read through that stuff on the weekends and I got done with it pretty fast.

Ok have a good week!! I love you all!

Love,
Chase