Singing the night away in to exhaustion

May 24, 2010

Last week we had a really cool lesson with someone that we tracted into. We brought the Sisters with us because one of them is from Brazil and the lady that we were teaching moved here from Brazil probably 15 years ago. It was a really good lesson. Most of it was in Portuguese but all of us were able to contribute to the lesson and I was able to keep up (for the most part) on what was being said and how she was receiving it. She had a lot of really good questions for us. She would ask her questions in English so all of us could understand and so that we would all be able to answer. At the end, Sister Kim pulled out her ukulele and we all sang to her. Solange (the investigator) liked it a lot. She was almost in tears by the time we were done. Haha, that might be bad in other instances, but usually as a missionary, when people are brought to tears because of you, it's a good thing. Haha.

We went to church yesterday and went into the Deacons quorum. I was really impressed by their spiritual knowledge. One of the deacons was teaching the lesson and they were talking about stuff that I have learned just on my mission. I wrote down some of their comments because I thought they were so good. I remember in my deacons quorum, it was always on the verge of a riot. Sometimes we had kids climbing out the windows and stuff let alone try and have a lesson where the spirit was there. haha. Anyway, I was very impressed. I sound old now. Pretty soon I'll be saying things like, "this generation faces so many more challenges than my generation did" or "This generation of church youth is the best generation the world has ever seen" or something of that sort.

I love all of you.

-Elder Blakemore

June 2, 2010

Hey all.  Lots has happened in the past couple of days.  The big news is, I got transferred after being in Las Vegas for 6 months.  I got transferred to Battle Mountain.  Now you have to look it up because I want to hear everybody's reaction.  Especially look up the article that the Washington Post did on Battle Mountain.  It is really funny.  My companion is Elder Ahmu.  He just got trained up here.  He is pretty cool.  He really loves this area and I hope that I will be able to be as good as the missionary who trained him.  His trainer is a really hard worker and just got called to be a Zone Leader.  I guess that he got everything going really well.  We live with some members for now in a double wide mobile home.  Our room is super small.  I can't unpack half of my stuff.  We're hoping to be able to get a house to rent soon.  Who knows.

It feels weird being back up north.  It kind of felt like I was coming home.  It will be fun because our Zone Conference is with Fallon and Carson City Zones and it might be in Carson City this transfer.  It is also Pres. McCracken's last transfer so I don't know if we are going to have a special zone conference for him with all 4 zones up north.  I don't know.

Battle Mountain is like 3 hours away from Fallon.  So I drove 8 hours from Las Vegas to Fallon then another 3 to Battle Mountain.  Yesterday was a big day.  I didn't go to sleep until 3:00 in the morning, woke up at 6:00 then drove for 11 hours, got here, ate dinner and went to bed at the normal time.  I woke up and was super tired this morning.  I fell asleep during studies and I almost fell asleep in one of our appts. today.  I'm very tired.  I need another P-day.

Well, I need to go.  I will email more about my Battle Mountain adventures next week.  I love you all.

-Elder Blakemore

Here is the article Matt referred to:  Battle Mountain