Here Comes The Sun!

My fellow Americans,

    This week was the bomb! Yesterday I felt the warmest weather in
almost 6 months. It was 22 degrees outside! That's 70 F! Needless to
say we spent our Pday outdoors playing ultimate frisbee it was
wondrous. Maybe if I say my prayers every night it'll happen again.
    This week we had 2 count them TWO discussions! Haha it was
glorious. We've been teaching a girl named Jamie and she's solid. Her
friend's in our ward and she's been coming with him for probably
around 3 months now. As long as I've been in the area, at least. She
was scared off by the previous missionaries, but since Elder Fifita
and I are too cool for school, she accepted our invitation to take the
discussions. Haha just kidding we're the two biggest goobers in the
mission, but we've been working for a long time try and make her feel
comfortable with us and help her realized we're normal people
underneath the suits. So we taught her the first lesson last week and
the second lesson yesterday. It went really well and she accepted the
invitation to be baptized! So that's sweet. We left the date to them
though so they'll get back to us soon. We also met with Scott, the
other member referral. He's in his early 20's and has two kids. He
really wants to change his life but he's afraid to start because he
knows it'll be a big process. So we've been teaching him and trying to
help him have the confidence in himself to change. Good stuff! We've
been really blessed the past couple of weeks it's been awesome. Summer
is a good time to be a missionary!
    Elder Fifita is almost better! I don't care if I jinx it I give
up haha. It's awesome though. transfers are next week and I can
honestly say I'll be sad if he gets transferred. It's taken quite
awhile to get used to each other but right now it's the best it's
been. I've really grown to love him and he's taught me a ton. Who
knows though! It's not unheard of for someone to stay in an area for 5
transfers and serve with the same companion for 3. So he could stay,
we'll see!
    We did a lot of service this week! One of the less-active members
in our ward works out on a farm, and so we went out twice this week to
help him. The first day we dug post holes put up a fence for the
horses. It was hard work! They were super basic fences, but it took
forever to put up the wiring around it. It was fun though it was good
to get outside. The second day we helped him chop wood. He always has
a ton of wood in front of his house and it honestly looks like it came
right out of the forest. We asked him where he got it and he said
"wherever." Haha we have our suspicions. Anyways so he chopped it all
up with a chainsaw and Elder Fifita split it all. I've never seen
someone split wood like him. The man's a power house it was crazy! He
did it a lot back home I guess. Afterwards we had a fire and roasted
marshmallows it was sweet! I miss camping.
    That's too bad that President Dalton's getting released. But he's
been in there since before I was born I'm sure! Interviews with him
were always amazing. Maybe he'll go to Nursery like President
Duncombe! :)
    Well that's pretty much all I've got for this week. Have
yourselves a good week! But don't have too much fun without me.

Love you guys,

Elder Read

PS tell Grandma Read I've gotten the two letters she's written. I'm
sending my reply off tomorrow. She's the best!

More Snow!

Hello Mother Read!

    This week was a nifty little experience! But I'll get to that
later. It sounds like you guys had an eventful week! Sorry to hear
Calista isn't a pageant queen, but from the sound of it I don't think
she's too devastated! Mom that's sweet that you got to see all of your
siblings! Yeah send me that picture of all of you! I'm glad you guys
had fun though.

    Winter did indeed return to the Great White North. I'm soooo done
with snow! I'm ready to come back to Oregon and drown in the rain. At
least it goes away after awhile and doesn't linger like a sore back!
Actually the snow melted again by mid week and then it started to
rain! :) I was dancing like wild man I loved it! I miss the rain it
reminded me of home. Elder Fifita......is sick again! Hahaha I knew if
I said something I'd jinx it! We aren't sure what he has but it's
taken off it's jacket and set up a cabin. Haha I'm convinced I'll
never see him healthy. Transfers are in two weeks (May 2) and chances
are I'll get someone else. Oh well, he's handled it pretty well all
things considered. I would still be in bed if it was me. He's always
hacking up his lung and he sounds like a chain smoker! Hopefully he'll
get better soon. But I won't get too excited :)

    Hey Mom thanks for the package I got it yesterday! Hahaha those
clothes are all small though. But I'm determined to fit back into
them! :) Good thing all my suit pants are expandable waists haha. When
I was with Elder Merrell he hit his original weight and he gained 30
pounds in 6 months hahaha. So there's hope my friends! I have yet to
pass 20. We literally get fed every time we stop by a member's house.
I'm ready to start pulling my "I can't I'm diabetic" card. But I hate
that, so we'll see. Moral of the story: Go somewhere where you eat
tree bark.

    So we taught two discussions this week. It was awesome it's been
too long. One we taught on Sunday, and it was a referral from a member
we got last week. The guy really enjoyed it and the spirit was strong.
After the lesson he asked us when we could meet again so we're gonna
meet again on Sunday. The other one was another member referral. She's
been coming to church for a couple of months and she was taught the
first discussion awhile back but was scared off for whatever reason.
We've been talking to her and trying to build her trust for a long
time though, and he lesson went really well. We feel like she's
comfortable with us and she understands we're normal people haha.
We're meeting with her next week too. The less-active family that came
to church last week skipped out this week! So we're gonna stop by
today and find out why. It was a good week though. Keep our
investigators in your prayers!

    That's all I've got this week. Not too much to report on, but in
other news I've been working on the same Sudoku puzzle every night for
the past 3 days. It's a doozy I can't figure it out! Anywho, have a
good week and be smart!


Love you guys,

Elder Steven

It's April 10th!

Creative title I know. I'm running out of clever things to say!

    This is getting ridiculous. I just deleted the email AGAIN! So
here goes my attempt to remember what I typed haha.

    Mom you were released!? That's super crazy I feel like you were
just put in the Young Womens! The Nursery is sweet though, I hope you
know how much the girls loved you in Young Womens though. I heard it
from them more times than you'd believe! Man I love the sacrament
meetings when everything changes! Branden Driver's the man I'm not
surprised he's in the Bishopric. What happened to Bro. Worsley and
Anderson?
 
Easter was sweet! The Bergers, the less-active part-member family
we've been working with since I got here came to church for the first
time in years! It was awesome to see them. We've been stressing that
we won't baptize her son until they've become active again, and it's
starting to seem like they're sincere in there desire to come back. It
was great. One of the members in our ward had a friend that we're
gonna teach next Monday too, so we're excited. It's cool the see the
work slowly start to pick up.
 
Easter dinner was at the Simmon's it was awesome. I love ham no
matter how many times I've eaten it! Afterwards we stopped by a
less-active family and they fed us cake. The past 3 times we've gone
over there they've been in the middle of some celebration and are
eating cake. It's getting ridiculous haha.
 
Elder Fifita is starting to get better! If all goes well we'll be
at full-strength this week. I'm starting to get superstitious though
haha. Every time I talk about him getting better he gets worse. So as
far as you're all concerned he's been in the hospital for 3 days and
isn't expected to recover haha.
 
The weather here is beautiful! It's almost 15 C outside and I'm
in short sleeves! Warm weather makes me trunky though. All I think
about is hiking back home and playing basketball after work! But
proselyting is a million times better in warm weather so that's good!
 
We went on exchanges with the zone leaders this week. I was with
Elder Morely, he's an awesome guy and he's my age! So of course we
acted accordingly. He taught me how to rip phone books in half, so at
the end of the day we spent the rest of the night ripping phone book
after phone book apart! The other zone leader taught Elder Fifita the
same thing so when we got back together we did the same thing! Kids
these days.
 
So yeah! It's been a good week. Thanks for sending all of the
stuff mom! I haven't gotten it yet but I'm sure it'll come soon. Have
fun in Utah, I love roadtrips I wish I could go too! Do work family!

Love you guys,

Elder Read

Weekly Report from Canada

Hello family of mine,

    This week was pretty solid. Tuesday night a member called and
asked us to come over and help them paint their house, so we went over
Wednesday morning, and worked from 10am until 3pm. It was brutal, I
strongly dislike painting haha. But we did it anyway, and I got paint
pretty much everywhere except the walls. Little did I know that primer
can come off in the wash, though, so some of my darks have little
white spots on them. When will I learn! Elder Fifita was given the job
of sanding the walls, and they didn't give him a mask or anything, and
he was still borderline sick. So after he was finished he got all
congested and it set his cold off again. He's starting to lose his
voice and he's even worse now than he was 6 weeks ago. So we went to
the doctor on Thursday night and they told him he has Bronchitis and
gave him a bunch of prescriptions. Hopefully they work haha he's a
little ornery when he's sick :) I still have yet to see a healthy
Elder Fifita!

    General Conference was awesome! Sunday Morning session was sweet.
I liked Elder Hallstrom's talk on how there's a difference between the
Gospel and the Church, and President Eyring's talk on Adversity. We
watched 4/5 sessions at the church, and then a member invited us over
for lunch Sunday afternoon so wewatched the Sunday Afternoon session
over tehre. Conference is the best, and it always comes right when I
need it too. I also liked President Uchtdorf's talk where he quoted
the bumper sticker "Don't judge me because I sin differently than you
do" hahaha everyone's quoting that! "Stop it" is another commonly
quoted phrase too :)

    It snowed again on Sunday, but then it melted by dinner. The
weather's getting warmer and warmer. We're now usually sitting at
about 12 C. I love the warm weather, it's glorious. Yeah Dad you
better believe we took those jackets off! We just wear a coat over our
shirt and ties :)

    So I went to put on my slacks the other day and they are a little
tight :) Mannnnnn! This week they made us relinquish our gym key
because we're too loud in the morning. Which makes no sense because I
ride the dinky little exercise bike in there and Fifita sleeps on the
workout bench haha. Oh well, we still have the exercise bike that we
found in the city :)

    We're hoping to start teaching a less active family in our ward
this week. Their son is 12 and told his mom he wants to start coming
to church and get baptized. So we went over last week and set up a
time to teach him the discussions. Missionaries have tried in the past
though, and nothing really happened. So we're hoping for a different
outcome this time around! Members here are awesome and are still
working with their friends. Hopefully when Summer rolls around things
will be going well.

    Alright that's all I've got today, not too much to report this
week. Have yourselves a good week and I'll talk to you next week!

Love you guys,

Elder Read

General Conference!

Oh my gosh. I kid you not, I just deleted the email again. This
MyLDSMail thing is garbage!

Anyways, fortunately I was only about 3 paragraphs in. I'll restart.

Hey there family and everybody else!

This week is General Conference! It's like the Super Bowl for
missionaries, I'm so excited! General Conference also means Suits come
off! I've been waiting for this day since I arrived in Canada. I've
never really enjoyed a suit very much and I've been waiting for 6
months to take it off :) So I'm pretty stoked. I figured maybe I'd get
used to it, but I really don't like it haha. I only have to wear it
for 6 more months of my mission after this week though :) Crazy!

It snowed again this week......lame. I'm pretty ready for spring. It's
been warming up slowly though, and the snow is almost melted again.
Hopefully we're done this year, but probably not. It's been an
incredibly warm winter though. I still hear "If you were here last
winter, you'd know how lucky you are this year" almost daily. Truth be
told, I'm really glad I wasn't here last year haha thank you diabetes!
:)

It blows my mind how much Canadians follow the happenings in the
States. Everyone watches March Madness and all of the other sports,
EVERYONE asks me about Mitt Romney and if I think he'll make it, and
then go off on a 30-minute politics conversation, and everyone remarks
at how little Americans know about Canada. Haha. I grew up not knowing
a thing about Canada, and they all grow up learning about the States
in school. It's pretty interesting. I wish I'd learned more.

So I think I told you they found out I play piano last week in
Priesthood? So I got asked to play again this week. I think it's going
to become consistent haha but I don't mind it keeps me up to date.
Having a keyboard in the apartment has been awesome. I love playing
the piano. I can honestly say I don't regret taking lessons, and you
have that in writing :)

Woooooo my sister's famous! :)  I think of that Rhode Island girl in
Miss Congeniality,

    "What is your idea of a perfect date?"
    "Hmm that's a tough one. I would have to say April 25th. Because
it's not too hot, not too cold, all you need is a light jacket."

Hahahaha knock em dead Calista! :) Pioneer-style beauty pageants! Woo!

Yeah Mom if you'd send all those things that would be much
appreciated. I can fit it all in my suitcases, but even then it
doesn't matter. I don't have to worry about stuffing things in
suitcases for another 18 months :) I have plenty of time to down size!

Sister Peart.....the name doesn't ring any bells, what does she look
like? I don't remember any Portland bound missionaries around our
classroom, but I might be wrong. Ask her where her classroom was.

Bryant's the man! I didn't bear my testimony in Sacrament meeting
until my mission haha good for him! We're only supposed to get up if
there's a gap between testimonies (which is pretty much inevitable
every week haha).

The work here is......slow haha but it's picking up! Ever since the
Mission-wide fast, we've noticed a lot of missionary activity in the
ward. They're all enthusiastic about it, so we've been trying to get
around to everyone and to encourage them in their efforts. My
predicition is that by summer things will be booming. Tracting around
here is pretty ineffective too. Most of the people that live in the
city of Spruce Grove are older people set in their ways, but we do it
anyway! We're bound to find someone.

Anyways, life's good! I'm excited for Summer and warmth. I forgot what
it feels like to be comfortable outside. I miss you all and hope
everything's going well back in the motherland!


Love you guys,

Elder Steven

Transfers come and go

Hey family,

So I just wrote this email.......and then deleted it by accident. I
don't know why it didn't save in drafts, but it didn't. So I'll do my
best to type what I had in the short amount of time I have left! Haha.

Transfers were this week, we expected a lot to change but nothing did!
Which is fine by me. Transfers are a headache, and the less I have to
deal with the better! Elder Fifita's been District Leader for 9
months, and will be at 10.5 at the end of this transfer. That's a
really long time haha so he was hoping he'd drop this transfer, but he
stayed. This transfer will be a huge one though. There are a ton of
people moving around, which is weird because there's no new
missionaries coming out this transfer.

Haha today we were coming home from service at the Salvation Army
Thrift Store, and we saw this exercise bike on the side of the road
with a "free" sign on it. So we stopped, threw it in the back, and
drove it home. It's now sitting in the only open space available, the
kitchen :) So forget going to the gym, now all I have to do is wake
up, walk into the kitchen, and I'm set! We were pretty excited about
it haha.

Hey so we have a problem.....you sent the wrong slacks :( These ones
are HUGE hahaha. The ones I want are black, and are the ones you
bought me last year, they have blue fabric on the inside of the waist,
that's the only way I tell them apart from the others. I also would
enjoy the gray slacks I bought last year. Slack season is in two
weeks, so it would be nice to have them :) Also, if you wouldn't mind
sending my dark blue Zoo York jacket that I got from a Staci a million
years ago, and also the black and white striped jacket I left home. I
know I know.....I should have brought them with me, but I didn't think
I'd need them! My need is dire.

Not much else happened this week. We went on exchanges with Barrhead,
and I finally got to leave the area! Leaving the area is like going on
vacation haha. You don't have to worry about teaching, planning,  etc.
All you do is follow the other person around, bear occasional
testimony, and eat all of the food in their apartment. It was
glorious.

Alright I'm out of time....I think I covered everything I had
originally.....if not I'll include it next week. I miss you guys! Hope
all is going well back in the good state of Oregon.


Love you all,

Elder Read

Happy Birthday to yours truly!

That's right! Tomorrow I hit 6 whole months! Man I'm a quarter of
the way done! I know it might sound ridiculous haha. But when I think
back to the MTC, I could describe a lot of those days in detail! Maybe
not, because let's face it, the MTC is the same day after day It was a
blur. But anyways, time's flying!
    Yesterday was awesome! Pdays are bliss, let me tell you about
them. We do our laundry at a member's house, they feed us breakfast,
we do our morning studies on comfortable couches, and it's free! Then
we shop for groceries, come home, eat lunch, we clean (kinda haha),
and then the Stony Plain elders come over or we go over there, we hang
out with them for a little while, and then we drive into Edmonton
together and play basketball or whatever they chose that week. Then we
drive home, shower, and go to dinner! Like I said, simply bliss.
Yesterday was sweet too because I got a BOATLOAD of mail! :) I love
mail! Keep it coming!
     Anywho, this week was pretty solid. Elder Fifita's been feeling
better so we've been waking up at 6am to work out in the gym down the
hall. It felt good to run on the tready, I miss running like you
wouldn't believe! So yeah it felt really good to run every
morning......and then the room next to the gym complained because they
were trying to sleep at 6:30 in the morning! Who does that! I was so
mad! So now I run like Lance Armstrong on the exercise bike that looks
and feels like it was made in the '80s. But that's life I guess! I
can't wait to run every day when I come home, that was the life, I
highly recommend it.
    Funny story! So the day before I left my last area, one of the
members told me to go and visit his daughters that lived in Spruce
Grove. They aren't active, and he didn't want them to know that I was
sent there, so he said to do a tracting approach and see if I could
get in. So 2 weeks ago, Elder Pinehault and I (we were on exchanges),
went and knocked one of the doors, and sure enough, she answered the
door, I did the tracting approach, and she let us in it was sweet. She
told us she was a member, and then she found out I had just come from
Southwood and so she found out I knew her dad. It was sweet, we set up
a time to come back and it was a good visit. THEN we had exchanges
with the zone leaders this week, and so Elder Graul and I were out
visiting members, and one of our appointments fell through, so I
figured it'd be a good idea to go and track down the other daughter
that we hadn't met yet. So I told him what her dad told us to do, and
he said "Nothin' like a little guile eh?" So we laughed and then we
went over. I knocked, a guy answered the door, I did the tracting
approach, he cut me off and told us he was a member and invited us in.
Sounds golden right? Wrong. You'll never guess who was over for dinner
that night! Not only was the sister that we had just talked to last
week over, but the parents I knew from Southwood were sitting at the
dinner table too! Hahahahahaha awkward! The dad looked like he had
seen a ghost when he saw us but didn't say anything, and the mom said,
"Hey Elder Read, long time no see!" Wrong thing to say haha. The
daughters both looked at us like we were crazy, and the parents just
talked to me like nothing was wrong...so we went along with it, talked
with them for awhile, and then left. The parents said they talked
about it though and everything's good, and we're still going over to
both of their houses to meet with them. It was a funny story though.
They always seem to happen on exchanges too.
    So that was pretty much the highlight of my week. Not much else
happened. We met with two families this week, and in one, the husband
reminds me of Geoff in every way possible, and in the other family,
the wife reminds me of Nicole! It's crazy how you see people you know
in others.
    Spring has sprung (thanks mom). It's been a balmy average of 8
degrees outside this week! It sounds cold, and probably is cold, but
we've been cooking! We took off our coats, took off the thermals, and
tracted a lot. Lately my view of tracting has been slowly going
downhill, but it's amazing when it's warm! I loved it! I missed the
warm sun more than I missed home. It even got up to 12 degrees! Haha I
reread this paragraph and I sound ridiculous, but it's true! You get
so acclimatized it's unbelievable. So yeah, it's warm. And dry! My
hands are dying! I woke up the other day and my finger was bleeding
because it's so dry. I bought lotion though, so no worries.
    Hey random request, can I have a picture of the Portland temple?
Prefferably one with lots of trees? I want to put it on my desk :) I
miss it!
    Another random request - I need the names of all my relatives
living in southern Alberta, I always tell people I have family down
there, and they say they know a ton of Hydes and then start listing
off all of these people I had no idea existed! So I want to know who
they are so I don't look like an idiot haha.
    Alright, that's all I've got for this week. Thanks for letting me
know about the tax refund, I'm rich! Just kidding, I'll save it in
case more tickets come up :) I appreciate you guys and all you do! I
miss you guys like you wouldn't believe!

Love you homies,

Elder Read