Greetings From San Jose

Hello Everybody,

This week was different, as all are I guess. Anyway last Sunday we went with our High Priest Group leader to administer a blessing to a girl in the ward who had dislocated her knee and wanted a blessing to help heal up and hopefully dodge having surgery. This is a family that we had attempted teaching before cause the husband is a non-member and they had agreed to hear all the lessons that we teach but we only ever got around to having one lesson back when I was with Elder Orgill here. So it was a little awkward sneaking back under the invitation of their home teacher to give a blessing but it went well and we even talked to the Sister and she said that she had signed up to feed us dinner so we'll be able to teach a lesson when we go for that and it should be good. On Thursday, I think I ranted a little about this last week but again our District leader gave the lesson duties to another companionship in the district to teach. And this companionship, well first heres a breakdown of how district meeting is supposed to flow. First we talk about how we accomplished goals last week, then we have a 25 minute lesson from the "district leader" and then we do role play type practice teaching lessons. So this companionship that was put in charge of teaching the lesson basically distributed the lesson onto everyone else by having us each go up and practice teaching a part of our first lesson in front of everyone. I'm mad at them yet jealous of their genius at the same time. They took an invitation to teach and basically do more work for District meeting and turned it around into an opportunity to reshift the work amongst everyone else and actually did less work than you'd do in an average district meeting. I wish my companion and I had thought of that when we went the previous week. Oh well. It was good yet right after the "lesson" we did almost the exact same thing so it was a little overkill. We get good practice though so that's the bright side.

On Friday we adopted another missionary for the day. Our Zone Leaders have a third companion who isn't a leader so when they go to leadership training meetings they have to drop him off at day care. He's a pretty cool guy. He came on his mission at the same time as my last companion and they are from the same place, La'ie Hawaii. He's part Samoan so he and my companion got along immediately, and I like him so our day was pretty fun together until my companion got sick later in the evening. That was the night of out ward halloween party but since my companion was sick we didn't go. Instead I read a little bit as my companion lay on the bathroom floor anticipating a puke that never came. It's okay though. I probably would have just eaten a bunch of food and candy at the party that I don't need.

Saturday we went and did some service for a lady that is a member of our ward I guess but I've never seen before. I think she manages a property that has a bunch of duplexs on it and a house that she lives in I think. Under the front porch of the house there was a bunch of tools and paint and random stuff, oh and spiders. Anyway we hauled it out of there and loaded it into a truck. We had another companionship come with us to help out. Funny how of all these missionaries I am the tallest but for some reason I was the one under a porch the whole time. The lady also had us move about some old rototillers and hose them off before loading them in a shed to store. She had a chicken coop, and we moved some old doors that had been sitting by the chicken coop for a while and as I know, where there are chickens, there are rats. Moving the doors unleashed a powerful rat urine smell that wasn't pleasant. She gave us a couple of rotisserie chickens and a bag of rolls and potato salad and we went back to our apartment to eat and then the rest of the day was pretty boring after that.

Yesterday was our Primary Program Sacrament meeting so obviously the chapel was packed. Somehow those little kids never fail to be really entertaining on accident. The third hour of Church was combined Relief Society and Priesthood and the bishopric was telling everyone about their plan to reach out to all the members of the ward that don't come. They split the congregation into four groups and had everyone pick a member off a list and agree that they visit that person and make them brownies or cookies and invite them to come to the ward Christmas party. Getting a jump start on it, I think it's a great idea seeing as there are like 663 people in this ward yet only about 170 come to church regularly. After church we had dinner with a family who happened to have chickens so I've gotten a lot of chicken time this week. They told about how the chickens escaped earlier that day and they had to wrangle them. The man had short sleeves and the evidence of chicken scratches were all over his arms. After dinner they asked us the 300 million dollar question. Which was "After your mission you go home and under your bed you find a suit case with $300 million in it, tax free, what do you do?" Both my companion and I were uncertain where to start so they offered up areas of spending and we gave some pretty lame answers I guess. But the whole point of the exercise that this couple likes to do with missionaries is that the dreams are all attainable without the vast sums of money to start. Aside from my companion wanting to own the Steelers. Of course we made it pretty easy on them, when asked what car we would buy I stuck with a Datsun 510 station wagon, of course that is attainable without 300 million dollars. Anyway it was a fun evening. Going to dinner with that family we sacraficed attending a fireside at which Steve Young was the main speaker but I wasn't too set on going to it. If you think about it, no offense to Steve but I'd rather turn up to play catch with him or something related to what he's famous for, not necessarily to hear him speak.

And that was my week in a nutshell. Hope everyone has a fun safe Halloween.

Sincerely, Elder Miller