Monday, October 8, 2012

Conference, Bone Marrow, and Blood Sausage


Dear Alpine family,

Hey-hey. Man, oh man, good to hear from y'all. Wow, what an up and down email that was:  Lani´s leaving and Traci is adopting! I’m kinda like super thrown off there but for the good stuff, that’s great! Give Traci a big hug from me, she’s got the right attitude about things. And do hit me up with Lani's mission address, if you would.  And tell Kevin he is in my prayers and he’s pretty much my hero no matter what.

Yes, how about that conference? 18, huh? When we heard that everyone was saying things like, "Dang it! I could have been married with kids now had I known that!" It was very exciting news, though. It was a good conference. I loved Holland’s talk. We have a talk he gave at the MTC about a year ago and it’s very similar--it was so good. When he came on all the missionaries were suddenly at attention and scooting forward in their desks and chairs—missionaries love that Jeff Holland. I also loved Dieter’s talk how he said we are in charge of our own happiness—and Christofferson's and Monson's talks in priesthood session. When Christofferson talked about we should do the best at what we are doing and Monson’s story about the missionary’s analogy of seeing the people in white. Scott’s made me regret not doing family history with Papa. And Oaks? Well, he pretty much just dropped Cain on people who aren’t nice to kids. That talk just about broke the missionaries’ hearts because we see so much of that here and there’s just so little we can do about it. I did like how Ballard talked about bees and Eyring about eagles (although all I could think of was dad’s very favorite (not) eagle song: Let the Eagle Soar).

Conference really taught me that I should listen to the spirit more. I’m gonna really try to start doing that more here. It was just so cool. I remember hearing somebody say that conference in the field was better than Christmas and I remember  thinking "are you high?" but now I see that they were pretty much dead on with that. We had conference in the nice, two-story stake center where Christofferson spoke when he came here. We had about 7 or so people in our comfy, English-speaking room. We had to go in our suits (which sucked because it was soooooo humidly hot) but it went well. As you can tell that’s pretty much the highlight of the week. Conference is always so good (and only 2 more here).

We had a goodish work week. We are slowly but surely coming along closer to baptism with Sebastian and hopefully Ignacio. We ate lunch at this guy’s house this week and had this weird soup. It was like the texture and taste of cold, refrigerated gravy. Turns out it was some good, tasty bone marrow soup! Dig it. Later that day, at a house of a recent convert, the wife of the recent convert gave us some morcilla (blood sausage). We ate it all, happily but oh, our poor tummies! We werent sick but it’s always kinda like you feel like you will.

I was talking to Larsen the other day about kids at his school and I asked him if he knew a Dan Isrealson who was in my MTC group going to Paraguay. Larsen said that, yes, he did know him and that he went to school with him and they used to hang out when they were little. Pretty tight, huh? But other than that there was really nothing new in the week.

Well, ?’s

  • What is your overall impression of Salta?

Good! Hot, humid but really it’s become pretty much home now.
  • Do you cook?  What do you cook?

Milanesea, ramen, empanadas, cereal with yogurt, etc. Nothing much, we don’t have an oven.
  • In the photo of your zone at the zone conference there was a cake looking thing in the front of the picture.  What was that?

A cake for the goal of 200 baptisms......hooray!
  • Do you ever get to talk to President Levrino?

Yeah: Interviews, conferences, the weekly letters, and just every now and then.
  • Did you see any old friends at conference?

I didn’t really see anyone I knew but I made a few new friends like Adams's old comp and some other peeps.

Well famz, I need to be heading. Watching conference did make me think of you guys a lot. You know at almost 11 months you feel very comfortable in the mish: A lot of the old fears and worries are gone or are starting to go away (like the homesickness of the first little while). Things like conference do make me a little homesick but in a good way--to know you guys were watching and listening at the same time was a really nice thing to know. I miss and love you guys so much.  Have a great week. Keep on keeping on, praying for us here, and just being happy. I love you guys it’s all good!

Con Amor,

Russ

p.s. I was going to send a pic of conference but the computer is being stubborn as of now so we'll see.

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