May 23, 2016

Hello family!

It's been a pretty good week here in Texas. I can officially confirm that I do indeed live directly on a golf course. As in, I have to walk past one of the holes to get to the main office. One of Elder Reich's favorite pastimes is collecting the golf balls that end up on our side of the fence. He has quite a few.

Let me tell you about my last few days in Saginaw though, then I'll get back to Denton. So, Tuesday we had yet another zone service project of cleaning up someone's yard. A lady drove by during the last one and asked our zone leaders if we could do the same thing at her house so we did. The awesome part is that this lady is a total nature/animal guru and owned three lemurs, two tortoises, and about a dozen cats. It. Was. Awesome. We got to watch the tortoises eat and everything! Once again, the lady was really appreciative and it was an awesome experience to end the transfer. 

That night we just contacted potential investigators for a while. One of them actually called the cops on us for talking to his kid who was playing in the front yard. He wasn't the guy we were looking for anyway. In order to spare a certain companion's dignity I won't tell the whole story. Suffice it to say that said companion learned something valuable that day and that no missionaries were taken into custody. 

Transfers were a little stressful as usual but I was excited. My ride to Denton from the Stake Center was also taking a new missionary and his trainer so I had to wait around for the new missionary meeting to end. That also meant that I had to hang out with all the departing missionaries for over an hour. I could almost smell the trunkiness. Anyway, so when the meeting finally ended, out walks this guy who I went to EFY with in 2012. He was the new missionary I was waiting for! Fun fact. On the way back he commented on how many trees there were in Texas which was hilarious because that's really only a Denton thing. His trainer and I looked at each other like, "Don't say a word. Let him figure out how ugly Texas is for himself." 

Besides seeing someone from EFY, I also found out that my trainer, Elder Simmons, is one of my new Zone Leaders. It's awesome but super weird because I've now been out twice as long as he had when he started training me. 

I'm loving my area too! Things aren't booming quite as much as the rest of Denton (another companionship had 23 more lessons than us) but there's a ton of potential. Elder Reich is awesome and hilarious so we've been getting along super well. I'm excited for this transfer, it'll be good!

Well, everyone's waiting for me so I better go. Love you, have a good week!

Love,

Elder O'Brien (the younger)