Received Mon May 3, 2010

Dear Family,

Dad's two comments about me in high school are pretty accurate. I went to sleep at around 9 or 9:30 my freshman and sophomore year, then my last 2 years I would usually go to bed around 10 or 10:30. And for at least my first two years in high school Dad would read to me at night. That's how I heard like 5 of the Harry Potter books.

BYU Stuff: I think it would be good if Steven could register me for some classes. I can always try to change it afterwards, but I think it would be smart to try to get some good classes early on. I'm probably going to need to take Statistics and some computer class to finish my prerequisites for the business school. I've thought it might be fun to take a soccer class too. Either that or a racquetball class.

Mother's Day Call: We found a member who will let us use their phone. We are planning at calling around 7:30 our time, so that's 5:30 your time I'm pretty sure. Hopefully that will work out.

This has been another good week in Houston 1. This is probably the hardest Elder Johnson and I have both worked in our missions. President Saylin got back from a meeting in Arizona where they met with some other general authorities, and one of the things they talked about was how in South America there are no cars, but in the US there are tons of cars and missionaries miss out on a lot of opportunities to talk to people. They gave promises to the mission presidents there that if the missionaries would park the cars and use bikes and rely on members to help them, we will always have people to teach. So he extended a challenge to all of us, that if we want we can accept, to park our cars for the month and not use them at all. So we've been doing it this week. It has been a HOT and reeeally humid week too. We rode our bikes to church and everything. Were definitely starting to run into some complications with dinner appointments all the way on the other side of the area from where we have all our other appointments throughout that day. And our area is huuge, so it is a challenge. We'll see what happens. I don't think I've ever sweat so much in my life. But we have found a lot of people to teach.

Here is a cool story. When we were riding home from church yesterday, we were talking to people along the way. I pulled over on my bike to talk to these two Hispanic guys walking down the rode and as I turned to talk to them, I realized I recognized one of them. It was Victor Hernandez, an awesome guy from Nicaragua that I taught while I was in Houston 2. He came to church several times, he was living all the commandments, and he had a baptismal date, then he disappeared because they all got evicted from their apartment. He had just gotten jumped too so he didn't have any phone. He was really happy to see us again yesterday. He said he's recently been thinking a lot about us and he wanted us to start coming by again, but every time he saw the missionaries they were always far away, so he was never able to flag them down. That would be cool if he was living in our area, but hes not. He's still back in Houston 2. So I passed on the referral to them. It made my day though.

We also saw another crazy thing happen. We were getting a ride home from our last appointment last night and as we were driving down one of the main streets in our area, these 2 cars zoomed passed us. One was an older Cadillac and the other one was a new Lincoln. They kept cutting each other off and they kept slamming on the brakes trying and they were trying to run each other off the road. They would actually bump into each other too...it was crazy. At one point the Lincoln actually pushed the Cadillac off the road onto the center median thing. Then when they passed through this intersection the Lincoln managed to pin the Cadillac between the median and his car, then they both jumped out of the car. We thought we were about to see someone get shot. Luckily neither of them had guns, and the one Cadillac guy jumped back into his car and back out into the intersection, into oncoming traffic and flew down the road. It was pretty crazy. I think it was probably just a bad case of road rage.

Everything has been going well. Elder Johnson and I are good friends. Spanish is going really well too. It has been awesome being back in a full Spanish area.

Oh yeah...Blue Bell Ice Cream. That's like the pride and joy of Texas. Its probably one of the first things I heard about when I got here. Its a brand of ice cream that I think they only sell in Texas. They have alll sorts of different flavors. It is all pretty good, but in my opinion (I would probably be hanged if I said this out loud here), I think its a little overrated and definitely over priced. Its like $5.75 - $6.50 for a gallon. It is pretty good though.

Ok well that's about all for this week! Have fun on your cruise Mom and Dad! Have a good week everyone...I love you!

Love,
Chase