Remachado

September 27, 2010

Hello family...

Well that's quite odd that Frost and Bone ended up in the house. I'll bet that was weird. Well this last week has seen some interesting developments. We got a new investigator on Tuesday, we set a baptismal date and everything, it's a 9 year old girl of a less active family that moved to Katy from Houston a few years ago and they've been hiding under the radar up until now. They decided that they want to come back and get their daughter baptized so we will see what happens with that. They didn't come to church on Sunday on account of having "visitors" over. Things will probably go slow with them. Elder Lamoure is getting better. Last week he was in the vitamin isle in wal-mart and decided to by these "St. John's Wart" pills that supposedly improve ones mood when taken regularly. And it's actually worked, he's been much more pleasant lately, now we just need to work on his laziness.

Thursday was a brutal day. Two days previously as we were coming out of our apartment this old lady in a car asked us if we could help her move out her friend, this 70-something year old man with one leg and Alzheimer's disease. Lived two floors below us and couldn't pay his rent and he was getting evicted from the apartment. We happily agreed and said we set up a time on Thrusday morning at 7:30 to get this guy moved out. We expected the move to take about 2 hours at the most. Well we finished at about 9:45 pm that night. The thing this woman had failed to mention was that they hadn't packed anything. It was ridiculous, this man had a ton of nasty old junk, he's a huge pack rat and he had all sorts of old junk and trinkets that he didn't want to leave behind, and a ton of furniture, like 3 huge glass cabinets full of expensive china, and all of these large dressers, hundreds of old books and papers, this man was a Catholic Priest back in the day and he still had his clerical wardrobe and all the incense, prayer books, and whatnot. We had one member from the local english ward helping us out, his name is Tony and he's 21 and just got back from Iraq. He's way cool, he and his family are Colombians who were originally in our ward but they switched the english ward a few years ago. So we had him and two sets of english elders who jumped back and forth between helping us and their appointments. We made so many phone calls that day, this sort of work is what members are for. But unsurprisingly nobody from our ward, and two english wards could help out except for this one guy. We couldn't just leave them though, this man and his friend, two aged people literally didn't have anyone else to help them. And the whole time the old man drove us nuts, wheeling around on his wheel-chair, complaining, making sure we didn't throw anything away, asking where his prosthetic leg was after we had told him that we had already packed it. The poor guy wasn't all there and we got so tired of him that we came very close to locking him in the bathroom while we packed up all his old nasty junk. The lady had rented a 17 foot U-haul truck. And from this little apartment this guy had it took two trips. His new apartment was actually out of the mission boundaries, it was 20 minutes south of us more towards downtown Houston. We called up the Houston Texas South Mission hoping to get some of the missionaries down there waiting on the other side so they could unload the guy but typically they were all "too busy" and wouldn't get help from their wards either. Except for two elders who had a 30 minute window to help us unload. It was a massive project so we got permission from President Hansen to go down there with our member in the U-Haul truck and unload. So we got down there, and the South elders helped us for about 20 minutes then they had to leave, leaving the three of us to unload this truck by ourselves. It took us a while, we were dead tired and our arms were like noodles but we did it, started on our way back, got stuck in Houston traffic, and finally got back around 6:00, we had left at 2:00. We had planned on the english elders finishing the rest of the packing so that it would all be ready to go by the time we got back. But it was not so, so we got back and packed and the truck was finally all ready to go by 8:00. Obviously we couldn't go unload the second trip because our curfew is 9:30. The best we could do was the give the woman the number of the south missionaries and we dropped the truck off in front of her sister's house who didn't live too far from the new apartments. We were exhausted, that whole day we didn't shower, shave, or even get dressed in proselyting clothes. All we had to eat the whole day was a yogurt for breakfast and a granola bar for lunch. After we had dropped off the truck Tony took us through the drive through of Taco Bell and the three of us gorged ourselves on cheap tacos and burritos. Then he took us home, we showered and went to be, completely exhausted. And ever since then we've had a crappy week, being sore and stiff and generally too tired to do anything, that and all of our investigators bailed out on us. We don't quite get it, an exhausting 14 hour act of charity and our area goes down the drain. You'd think that we'd be more blessed after doing something like that.

Whatever, I hope everything is going good at home. The weather is getting better here, it's starting to cool down. Today it feels almost like Utah outside. Well I'm out of time, I love you all and hope you have a good week.

-- Elder Rice