8/26/2013

Guess what everybody!

I've decided to start a new section of the blog entitled: "Quotes Taken Out of Context". It will be spectacular. 

This week's quotes:

      1: "Lotion is essentially arm hair gel."

      2: "It's like petting a dog, but cuter!"

That second one gets even funnier when you actually put it into context. Sister Keenan was referring to the willow tree that she was stroking.

So there you go. Quotes that we found funny, but whose humor will probably not be appreciated by anyone else.

Anyway. I'd like to start off by informing y'all that it has been raining for about two days now, and it dropped the temperature by 40-50 degrees. Seriously. The normal range is 105-115, and it's been about 65. What is this?!

So yesterday we rescued a child. We were driving along the road and this kid was running down the side walk. Then he'd stop, look around, walk about 20 more feet, start running again, stop. I was like, "why am I thinking that he looks like an escaped autistic child?" We kept driving, turned around to help him, figured that was creepy, turned around to head on our way, turned around again because we didn't like the fact that he was crossing the busy highway, finally decided that we'd risk looking like creepy kid-snatchers, and went to go talk to him. We pulled up the road ahead of him, then got out and waited till he got to us. We asked him what he was doing, but it was really hard to understand him. In the end we determined that he was, in fact, an escaped autistic kid. Since we aren't allowed to give people rides, we decided to walk with him, wherever he was going, to make sure he made it safely.

Keep in mind, that it's still 65 degrees outside and raining. After telling us his full name, giving us directions to both his house and his grandfather's house, and trying his hardest to give us his phone number (he could only remember 6 of the 7 numbers), we asked if we could just walk with him to Noah's house. No idea who Noah is. At that point he informed us that he wasn't allowed to talk to strangers, so we agreed to walk next to him without saying anything. After about 3 minutes he gave up and started talking again, but none of it made any sense, so we just smiled and nodded. When we finally arrived at Noah's house, someone (presumably Noah) opened the door and looked very surprised to see us all standing there. Our little charge introduced us as the "church people". We knew the family that lived there, and they apparently knew him, and knew he shouldn't be out, so we left it at that and walked back to our car.

This is going to show how spoiled I've become, but while we were walking all over in the rain, not ONE person offered us a ride. And we were passed by at least a dozen members. Boo.

Unfortunately, that is the only story I have time for. I keep saying I'll write more next week, but there never seems to be any time. I'll have to keep a good journal so I can write some follow-up posts after the mission. We'll see. :)

Have a good week everyone!

Sister Peart

8/19/2013

Hey Y'all!

I was going to send you some pictures that I had taken, but then I realized that I currently do not possess any in which I look halfway decent. So.....next time. We have plans to take pictures with the baby ostriches on Wednesday, so we'll see.

We went to the temple today, which meant that I had to give up most of my email time....so I'll email y'all back next week, I promise.

Other than that...

HOLY WEEK OF MIRACLES!

The first one is the one that makes me look the best, so we're starting with that one. Since I already wrote about it in my journal, I'm just going to type that journal entry up. That way I don't have to waste precious energy thinking words:

"When I first moved to La Verkin, we ate dinner with the Tuttles. Brother Tuttle told us about a less-active man who he home teaches. Brother Freng and his wife were sealed in the temple, but shortly after that she died. He became very bitter and pretty much devolved to the point where he spent all his days at the only bar in town. As he was telling us about Brother Freng, I had an idea to secretly leave post-it notes on his door; post-its with scriptures written on them. When we got in the car, I told Sister Gregory, thinking she might think it was a stupid idea. (Probably because I thought it was kind of stupid myself) I'd only been in the area two days I think, so I wasn't sure if it would be worth trying. She agreed to it, so we started leaving scriptures on his door several times a week. After a few weeks, Brother Tuttle commented on the difference in Brother Freng. Originally, he wouldn't accept home teaching visits. Brother Tuttle could only get in when he accompanied the Relief Society sister who fills out his food orders. Apparently, James said a prayer with them that night, and Brother Tuttle said the Spirit was really strong. We were excited, but weren't sure if it had anything to do with our notes. We kept doing it anyway, and today, when we went to drop off a note, there was one for us! After leaving notes for 7 weeks, we received this note: 'Thank you so much for the inspiration. It helps me every day. -Brother Freng'"

So yeah. Miracles. Since it was my idea, I got to keep the note. :) Also, we looked up how old Brother Freng is last night....Sister Gregory thought he was an old white guy. Like in his 60's or 70's. I thought he was a young asian guy. Like 20's or 30's. Yeah. He's 56. And considering this is Utah, he's probably white. I was way off...oh well. :) I'll send a picture of the note next week.

In other breaking news, I involuntarily held a naked cat. It was probably the single ugliest thing I have seen in my entire life. Seriously. We were at a teaching appointment with these crazy animal people. By the time we started the lesson, Sister Keenan had a cute little dog on her lap, and Sister Gregory had some exotic giant african kitten....that was bigger than the dog. I made the comment that I was the only one without a friend (completely happy with that fact), and the lady went into the back to grab me a "friend". She came back out with the ugliest thing I have ever seen. She calls it a hairless cat. It looks like......I can't even give an accurate comparison. It was that ugly. Bald, wrinkly, ugly smashed-in face. PLUS, it's front two legs are quite a bit shorter than it's back legs. By a lot. It is ugly. And named Baldemort. Gross gross gross.

So yeah. That's unfortunately about all that I can tell you about the week. We have plans to go to DI after this, and, quite frankly, the idea of shopping for clothes is a lot more enticing than the idea of writing...sorry.

Have a good week!

Sister Peart

August 12,2013

Everyone!

I have terrible news. When we were at someone's house for dinner I decided to use their restroom. I couldn't resist the siren call of the scale there, and made the mistake of weighing myself.

I HAVE GAINED 24 POUNDS!

24 pounds. It's been like 3 months. If I keep this up, I will have gained 144 pounds by the time I come home. No WONDER my elastic band keeps cutting into my waist. Seriously. I have had to start running in the morning to avoid having to buy all new clothes. Running. I detest running.

Anyways. Just thought I would get that out there. That was possibly the most traumatizing bathroom trip of my entire life.

So. Let's see. Ah, I have a self-defense victory story! :D

So we were visiting this lady that lives right across the street from Mr. Creeper (who we haven't seen very much recently) and we were standing on her front porch talking. And by "standing on her front porch" I mean we were standing on the ground in front of her house. There isn't really a porch.

Anyway. So we're standing there and she was pointing to the mountain in front of her house that was on fire yesterday (La Verkin is very dry) and I saw that Mr. Creeper was at the top of the hill staring at us. So I did like our cop teacher told me to and looked him in the eye. Only instead of looking away we just stared at each other so after a while I got bored and just did a tiny wave to let him know I would know who to identify in a line-up and went back to the conversation. 

At that point I went into the "inconspicuous fighting stance" and kept on talking. I knew he was still on the hill because I looked a couple times and the lady's dog kept staring at him. After like 10 minutes I go to look again and he's walking up the driveway towards us. I go into my "not-so-inconspicuous fighting stance" and I see Sister Gregory (on my right) go into her "conspicuous fighting stance". Unfortunately, Sister Keenan was on my left (closest to him) and has never met Mr. Creeper.

He came up and started off his sentence with "Is it against mission rules for sister missionaries to..." and I was good and ready to answer with a firm "yes". However, he ended it with "....take home some fresh home-grown peaches?".  So he went back up the hill and presumably picked us a bag of peaches.

When he came back down, he gave us the peaches and asked where we were from and engaged in a few minutes of pleasant small talk. Then he left.

So you may be wondering why this counts as a self-defense victory, since there was obviously no self-defense going on. The victory was that we stood in fighting stances....and we got peaches.  After typing it all out, it seems like much less of a victory, but our self-defense teacher was quite proud of us.  We told him about it, and he agreed that Mr. Creeper is indeed quite nice when he's sober. Apparently he doesn't have any bad feelings for us getting the cops called on him.  Either that or he is eager to appease us so the cops will leave him alone. I guess they have all had little chats with him about leaving us alone and it's probably hurting his meth business. Either way, we had peaches for breakfast. :)

I'm trying to think about what else happened this week....this nice lady we had dinner with is making us little purses. She's so sweet.

OH. Duh. We have another golden investigator! :D Another one in Virgin, no less. We met with her the other day, she's really excited, wants to get baptized, and we have a lesson with her tomorrow. Sweet! Growing up her dad was LDS, and her mom was Catholic, and she apparently just grew up as a Catholic. She said she's kind of always thought she should be a Mormon, but she didn't want to let her mom down. Apparently, a little while ago, she mentioned to her mom that she wonders if she should have been Mormon. Her mom was like "well why don't you go to church and find out?" That took her by surprise, and then we showed up. :)

Oh yeah, one more story: we were supposed to come visit this family, but we weren't sure which house was there's, so we were walking up the street trying to guess which one. We thought maybe it was this one, and then I heard this weird noise, and I was like "is that an exotic bird?" So we went up to the house and the guy was half naked and drunk and I just asked him if he had a exotic bird. He was like "who told you?", and I was like "I just heard it. Can we see it?" Turns out he's a falconer and has a hawk in his yard. Although, the noise I heard was actually just the quail that he feeds to the hawk, but hey. He still has an exotic bird, so I was pretty much right.

Anyway. That's all the time I have for stories today. I'm sure you're all just dying to hear all about good old La Verkin. :P

Have a lovely week!

Sister Peart

Lyn: My mom said that you've tried sending me some letters. I haven't gotten any, so that's unfortunate. But at least now I know you haven't forgotten about me! :D Yay!

 

 

Sister Peart, Michael, Sister Gregory

8/5/2013

Helllooo everyone.

This week was crazy, as usual. I'll just go through it chronologically.

FRIDAY

We went to a ward party in La Verkin. While socializing with people (one of my favorite activities...not), we ran into this older couple. They look at me and say "Hey, how do you pronounce your name?" I tell them and they're like "We had some really good friends named Peart back in North Carolina. Ed and Jeanie."

For those of you who are unaware, those are my grandparents. So I, obviously, am super excited and explain which of the billions of children is my parent and so on and so forth. We talk about how I need to talk to their son when I get back so he can give me a job, and other fabulous things like that.

It was crazy! I guess I've been keeping that in the back of my mind, because, when I got to talk to my dad for a couple minutes in the airport on the way here, he mentioned that there were family friends in St. George. I knew I wouldn't remember the name, but he said it was ok because they'd recognize my name. I just never thought I'd run into them in La Verkin, of all places. Turns out they live literally right across the street from us. Crazy.

SATURDAY

Transfer calls day. We were going to a sealing for a recently reactivated family, so we were praying that we'd get the call before we went into the temple. Right before we went in it finally came and guess what! Sister Gregory and I are both staying in La Verkin! But it gets even better! Sister Keenan is going to join us and we're going to be a trio!

I just about died. I was so excited I didn't even know what to do with myself. The whole time in the temple I looked like one of those annoying small dogs that pees itself when it gets to excited. Don't worry, I didn't pee. But I was pretty excited.

Sister Keenan's companion got her visa to Brasil a few days ago and she flies out in the morning. I was slightly jealous, but now I get Sister Keenan, so really I have the winning situation here.

Let's see. Later, when we got back from the temple, I dragged Sister Gregory over to the Entwistles (the family friends) to make a dinner appointment. I also wanted to test a theory I had. Since Sister Keenan's mom grew up with my aunt I figured there was a good chance that he Entwistles would know her family as well. I asked, and they do. Dinner on Wednesday is going to be fabulous. 

THEN we had Michael's baptism! Unfortunately we got there and they were having another baptism at 6, so we had to push his back from 7 to 7:30. But it all worked out ok. It would have been fine, but they took forEVER and also it was the baptism of a child so there was only about 2 feet of water in the font. That wasn't going to work, so we started a bit late and just made all the speakers scream over the waterfall that was filling up the font. Afterwards we couldn't get the drain open, so Shelly (Michael's kind-of mom) just jumped right in the font and unplugged it. In her church clothes. I love her. She went through all the trouble of taking off her shoes, but then put them on while she was still dripping wet, so that was pointless. :)

STORIES THAT ARE NO LONGER DAY SPECIFIC

Oh yeah, so apparently all of the cops have gone and had several chats each with Mr. Creeper. Our cop assures us that he won't be messing with us. I guess you don't mess around with the missionaries around here. Apparently one of them is a convert that takes his missionary protection duties very seriously. Good to know.

During our self-defense lesson today, the cop's wife pointed out how well I was doing with my defensive stance. Apparently every time he comes near me I automatically take my stance and put my hands up. I didn't realize I was doing that, but it doesn't surprise me. He's assured us that he knows he can't touch us because we're missionaries, but I still wouldn't put it past him to randomly shove us over or try and attack us. Apparently he always does that to his wife to make sure she's keeping up on her reflexes. One time in the parking lot he tried to hug her from behind and she throw her elbow in his gut and went to fight him before she realized it was him. I think he learned to be a little more careful once he could breathe again. :)

Let's seeeeeeee, what ellsssee. Oh yeah! I sent my mom some pictures of Logan's baptism. Logan was an 8 year old that we taught before he got baptized. We don't usually do that, but his parents are pretty new in the gospel, so we went ahead and did it anyway. Logan was the very first lesson I ever taught on my mission, and he was also the very first baptism I ever went to on my mission. He's so cute. When I first met him he had a mohawk and a pirate earring, but he lost that look for his baptism. He's precious though. :)

I think that's about all I have for y'all today. Definitely just got my foot caught in the wires under this table and almost destroyed the Family History Center's new computer. Whoops. Better go...

Have a good week!

Sister Peart