8 January 2017

Hello Mum,

This week was pretty good! Elder Cobabe got sick on Monday..... so really we stayed in the apartment all week. Which doesn't sound that great, but I say it was a pretty good week because the 11 and 13 year old kids I've been talking about recently got baptized on Saturday! It was so cool.  Both of their parents are less active so it's cool to see their parents be involved in it. We got to stand in on the confirmation. It was a wonderful day. We also had interviews with President on Saturday. He's going to try to do them every transfer where he used to have them every other transfer. So they have to be shorter interviews. They can only be 15 minutes now, but President is a very loving and concerned and talkative guy, so they always take longer than that. Anyway, it was a good interview. It's always good to talk to President, it's just comforting. We had MLC on Thursday, that was good too. At least as good as an all day meeting can be. After MLC it is a tradition to go to Buffalo Wild Wings for dinner after. Well on our way back to Lincoln. I was getting on the freeway, and Elder Cobabe and I were talking , and Elder Cobabe looks over at the guy next to us, and he is just staring at us, so we start laughing. We thought it was a joke! So Elder Cobabe rolls his windows down and goes to wave to this guy and talk to him when out of nowhere this guy gets out this cup and slings some kind of liquid at us! So the window was down a little bit, so it got on each of us. More on the car but a little bit on us. First we thought, maybe it's alcohol, but it didn't smell like that, it smelled a little bit minty, so we though maybe tea, but we decided it wasn't that, it had a different consistency... so we think it was this guys dip spit. So all that spit you get in your mouth from chewing tobacco. You know how cowboys are constantly spitting in a cup. Yeah... it was pretty gross, but we thought, how cool is that!? Think about the apostles and Christ himself, they all got spat on. So we were pretty upset at the time, but thinking about it now it was a unique experience....that neither of us want to happen again. It has been raining a ton here! Yesterday was this huge storm, or so the locals called it. Apparently the news was saying there was a thing called an "atmospheric river" which to me sounds silly! It was a good rain but I think they were overreacting a tiny bit.

(Here are a couple of stories from my mission to Okayama, Japan in 1985 that I wrote about....Riley and I looked at the weather and saw that you have had rain much of the day.  I guess that's when being in a car is a bit better than riding a bike.  We were out rain or shine every day and night on our bikes.  I did love my bike.  I remember one time when it was raining so hard and the wind was blowing it completely sideways.  We had to ride over a bridge over a river to get home, and the wind was worse over that.  The water in the river was splashing and waving about.  When we got home our wellies were full of water.  We found out the next day that we had been riding through a typhoon.  We got scolded by the members when they found out we'd been out riding our bikes in it.  Another time we had a baptism that was going to be done in the ocean.  It was another terrible rainstorm.  The waves were crashing so high over the rocks.  When I think about it now, I cannot even believe the elder and young woman went out into the ocean in that storm.)

Those sound like insane stories! Sometimes I feel incredibly privileged to be in a state side mission! Haha! Hearing all these crazy stories, and I'm in a 2017 Chevy Malibu! It's pretty crazy. In interviews I told President I liked being on a bike, which is pretty risky, if you say you like biking he knows who to put in a bike area haha! So we will see what happens. Hopefully I'll have cool stories like you. I can't even imagine trying to baptize someone in the ocean. You'll need to tell me more of your cool mission stories. I love you mum. You really do show me how to work hard. It seems like you're always up doing something. I love and miss you guys. I hope you have a better week this week. I love you.