word. Lets see, trying to think of what happened this week.... give me a few minutes.

Ok thought #1-- my ward at home is the bomb.com

Last week i recieved a bunch of post christmas cards from my ward, and some christmas presents in them! I was way surprised to think that anyone still remembers me at home. It was a pretty cool shock and surprise, now i've got to get around to writing all of them. I'm so super thankful for the support i'm recieving from home, so thats pretty rad for thought #1.

#2-- Number of Discussions Up, and Reasons Why

My number of overall discussions went up over the past 2 weeks. I think its mainly because of a different approach my new companion takes to tracting. We pray about where to go in our bubble* and then we tract that street. Usually we go where we're needed it seems like, which is pretty cool. We have a whole bunch of new investigators, but we're also realistic about baptism. I was way super excited to see Maurice baptized, so i can't imagine how much more excited i'll be to see someone who gets taught by me get baptized. We've got a couple people i could see moving towards baptism , so we set our baptisimal goal at 3 for the transfer**.

#3-- My Zone is Annoying.

The cool thing about this is, anyone who would get offended by reading this wont read it. My Zone*** is pretty dumb. They're cool as far as people, but they have some weird ideas about missionary work. At Zone Development Meeting (ZDM) we met and tried to have a zone sacrifice to show that we want to baptize more people. Pretty noble idea, pretty terrible execution. Our meeting turned into argue fest 2004, and the spirit left 5 minutes in to the meeting. I'm the youngest**** one, so I didn't really say anything because i don't know how its supposed to work, i just sat back and watched the nastyness unfold. The good part about zdm was that my companion realized it was stupid, and he tried to tell eveyone to pray about what we should do, but no one did that. So it was annoying.

I gave a talk at zone conference about missionary work, and the topic was "what would jesus do if he were in our shoes to get the members more involved." I didn't have a great answer, but i just said in a nutshell "have the members feel the same fire that we do for missionary work, and make them feel as good as an investigator." A couple of the reccomendations i gave were to have missionaries teach discussions to members so that they could feel the same way that investigators do, and so we could continue to teach more often.

I don't know what else to say, i've said pretty much all i wanted to.

*=Within an area, we set a bubble. We tract only in the bubble so that we can get to know a select group of people super well, and then we change the bubble after its been tracted out 5-8 times.
**=Each 6 week period between times when we transfer is called a transfer period, also reffered to by missionaries as the transfer. Missions aren't thought of in months generally, they're thought of in transfer periods. Most missionaries serve 16~ transfer periods.
***=(missionary orginzation goes like this 2 in a companionship -> 3 companionships in a district -> 2 districts in a zone -> 2 zones per stake, 10 zones in our mission. )
****=Youngest by time served. I'm at 2 ish months or something.

oh yeah, is my picture still showing up? It doesn't show up at the library, but they have that proxy server or whatever. Someone e-mail me and let me know.