Flesh Storm

Familia:

Did I really sound that miserable in my last email? Let me go read over it again.... Hmmm... Yeah that was kind of a less than good week, but I wasn't all that miserable. In the MTC my companion Elder Wood always said I was too pessimistic about everything, I told him that he should see me when I'm actually pessimistic. Hmmm, maybe I just sound like that to everyone. That or I think that all of the not so fun things that happen are more interesting to relate than the good things that happen to me as a missionary.

So anyway.... This week... We had Zone Conference on Tuesday, we drove up to College Station for it. On the way up my companion was driving and we had to get up early in the morning to make all the way up to college station by 8:00, anyway he was driving and I guess he was speeding through a school zone because a cop pulled us over and gave him a ticket for speeding in a school zone. He was rather bummed, turns out it's gonna cost him $230! Ouch! Wait till his parents hear about that. It was a good zone conference though, the subject was about using the Book of Mormon, which was yet another blow to my companion that day because before then we'd, or rather HE had been teaching our investigators primarily out of the Bible, which is a formula for an epic fail. Ain't no one ever been converted by the Bible.

The following day was probably the first day that I've actually been cold here in Texas, we were on bikes that day and there was this horrid wind that was blowing real hard. Anyway we were going to find the police station so Elder Porter could see how much his ticket was gonna cost and to see if he could get it dropped or something or another. So we looked up the police station's address and saw that it was on 'Old Montgomery Road' which was just off the Fraiser, which is the big road that like the train tracks, divides the city of Conroe in half. So we thought that we'd just go down the Fraiser until we hit that Old Montgomery Road, so we started biking and there was real hard wind blowing and these big dark clouds of death tearing through the skies at high speeds, I had never seen clouds move so fast before, I thought it was gonna break open and we'd be drenched in a minute. It never did though, so we biked down the Fraiser looking for it... and looking for it... and looking for it... going down and down and down... About 8 miles later when we reach the city limits Elder Porter concluded that we had missed it, he pulled the map out of his bag and saw that Old Montgomery Road was like 400 yards from where we lived. So we turned around and bike all the way back up, with the wind against us the whole time, by this time I wasn't cold anymore, and we came back to right where the road should be. It wasn't there. Now here's the thing about roads in Texas, they have multiple names and randomly stop and a new road will start on the same road. Well we eventually found the police station and that's when we found out how much the ticket was gonna cost and it turns out that the judge or whoever wasn't there so we had to come back another day to see him. So then we biked back home, walked in a collapsed. It was only like 3:00 and we were exhausted. We decided to do "weekly planning" which means having a long nap.

Let's see that was Wednesday... Oh on Friday it snowed! Incredible huh? Snow in Texas, never thought I'd see it, the locals were dumbfounded and confused by the snow. Which was more like light hail than snow, none of it stuck of course. I got some pictures of it that I'll send. Not much else interesting happened this last week. Saturday we once again biked all over town, I don't have a butt anymore, now it's just my tailbone grinding against the rock like seat of my bike. So yeah, I'm getting a lot of exercise from that.

Mi espanol is getting better, slowly. I'm getting to the point that I can understand their spanish better than their heavily accented and broken english, so perhaps that indicates progress but who knows.... Well that's about all the interesting things I have to say. And don't worry about the incredibly slow speeds and which mail and other things travel, not a problem it's okay. Though now I think it's a better idea that y'all send packages, and maybe letter to the mission office. Because just the other day a package for Elder Nelson came, 3 weeks after he'd been transferred. That was funny, so in the future, especially at the end of this month when transfer calls are coming up, mail things to the mission office address. The Hafer Road one, I don't remember what it is, hopefully you still have it somewhere. And if other people ask give them that address if they want to write me. Which nobody does, I never did hear from Adam, Austin go tell him to send me a bloody letter. Well cool, that's all I got and I'm running out of time here. I hope all goeth well in la tierra de los montanas. I miss the mountains and the snow. And send me some more photos that I can put in the little photo book thing, now that I can almost communicate with the ward members they want to get to know me and see pictures of my family and stuff. Okay I'm done, peace out.

-- Elder Rice