Week #5

Hey Family,

Did you get my email last week? I answered a lot of this stuff there. Anyways, Elder Nevarez is such a cool guy. He is from Ranchocucamunga (spelling?) California. He played baseball throughout high school. We go running every morning and then do like push ups, situps, and pull ups. He is the youngest of 5 children and his parents are on a temple mission in Denver, Colorado. I love the ward that I am in! The people are super nice and have us over for dinner all the time. It is probably about half the size of the home ward. All of the areas in up-state (the ones everywhere but the big cities) have cars, and all of the others get transit passes to ride the bus and subway or they walk everywhere. We are teaching a 15 year old boy, Danny Sanchez, and he has accepted a commitment to be baptized the 29th of Sep. We are teaching a lady about mom's and dad's age, Sharon Oliva, her parents are RLDS (they believe the same things we do except that the prophets should be in the blood-line of Joseph Smith and they have changed so that females can hold the priesthood) so it is kind of difficult trying to teach her with her parents pressuring her to not change. Her daughter, Ally, who is my age, however, was baptized into our church and is really strong so we will see which influences her the most. We are teaching a lady is a very less active member and her husband and daughter who are not members. The mom has a smoker's hole and gets sick all the time. The dad is kind of crazy but super funny and the daughter is kind of quiet but they are both coming along pretty well, we just can't seem to get any of them to come to church. We have some other investigators but I still have yet to meet them. Every time we get an appointment with them they always end up cancelling. We ate at the Oliva's last night and had chilli cheese potatoes and salad. Ally loves to bake things and is always making up new cookies and desserts. She always makes tons and then gives us whatever we don't eat so we have a big plate of brownies, these oatmeal cinnamon cookies that are a lot like snickerdoodles, and those homemade oreo cookies but with this REALLY good peanut butter creme in the middle. I think so far my favorite meal has been these authentic enchiladas and this bundt cake that was called orange cake.

Ya I went to an instacare to get some medicine for my sinus infection. I told the Dr. I get them all the time and told her I had been fighting it for a week taking the mucinex, claritin, and fluticasone nose spray. She just started laughing and was like wow normally people won't be taking anything before hand and thats when it gets bad. She was like normally thats what I'll tell them to go start taking. She just asked me what medicine I would like and I told her the Z-pack and again she started laughing and was like "wow, you do go through this a lot, that is exactly what I would have prescribed anyways."

We had a zone conference yesterday and the mission president came and talked with everyone. He told us that he is now allowing i-pods (as long as we play them over speakers) and all of the cars have cd players so if you want you can actually just send me the cd's and maybe make a few with like some disney songs or other uplifting fun music like that. Just use your best judgement. Apparently the old mission president had also made a rule saying no one could go past 59th Street (into Times Square). He told us that we are free to go in there now and can look around. The last cycle or two that we are here (6-12 weeks) we can go see a broadway show which will be way fun! If we are ever in the city and there is a Yankees game on a Wednesday (P-days for us) in the afternoon we are able to go. It usually happens 3-4 times a season. I think that would be so cool and can't wait until I get to be in the city because we can go to the Temple once per cycle if we are there as well.

It sounds like all of you are having a lot of fun! Hopefully school starts off well for Mikey. Hopefully that new job treats Spencer well. What does MegaDyne do? and what is Spencer doing for them?

Love you all,
Elder Fuller