Greetings From San Jose

Hello All, Things are going well around here. I say goodbye to my companion tomorrow, but the sadness will last only a short while as they force the transition on you quick. I'm not sure if I wrote about this last week but my companion had always been eager to sit in on the meetings held by President and the Assistants to determine who gets transferred where and so he asked if he could sit in on one before he goes home and so we were invited to do that on Tuesday and it was neat. Not exactly as inspirational as I think my companion was hoping but it was just plain cool to get the scoop on transfers way before the rest of the mission. We actually don't know that much, we sat in on the first meeting but they had a couple more on different days to solidify the whole process. We just caught the initial ideas and placements when it may all be changed around later. Through this though I think I'm much more prepared to guess who my new companion will be. I'm going to put it out there and guess that I will get Elder Fields as my companion next. We may likely e-mail tomorrow to update our families on this new change and so we'll see how good my predictions are. I already wrote about this I think but on Monday we had a lesson with the girlfriend of the less active guy that we got coming to church very regularly and he's completely invested and active now. The lesson went well and we have determined she's a new investigator. We haven't met with her since and part of the problem there is that she actually lives in Fremont and just visits her boyfriend very often in Santa Cruz. Well if any of you recall, Fremont was my first area and so I asked which street she lives on and the answer was Decoto. I remember that street very well, not because I drove on it, in fact I never went on it, I remember because apparently there is a huge church building on that street that everyone would ask us about, or when we were trying to tell people where we meet for church everyone would assume it was the Decoto road building cause they all noticed it cause it kind of looks like a taco bell they would say. The reason I never saw the Decoto building is because it is actually out of our mission. This is the age old missionary dilemma. Well not actually age old cause I think back in the day they didn't exactly have boundaries and no other mission president would get on your case for stealing investigators cause they didn't have mission presidents, but we do now and our new investigator I think lives in the Oakland mission boundaries. Not only would we be stealing her from some other missionaries but we'd be stealing her from missionaries that aren't even in our mission. Normally I think I would just keep this under wraps but our mission President recently had to deal with some other case where missionaries baptized a lady that didn't live in the mission and so he made sure that everyone knew to tell him if we are teaching someone that doesn't reside in our area. So I'll try and talk to him about it at transfers tomorrow. Perhaps my favorite thing this week was service. We got to dismantle a walk in refrigerator that was at the police station. It was pretty neat. The evidence department had this huge refrigerator in case they had perishable evidence they needed to keep but they found that the fridge actually had too much moisture and damaged the evidence so they donated this thing to the local soup kitchen. We got to walk past all these file boxes labeled by year, like on the tv show Cold Case. We turned right when we came to the corner stacked with rifles and a sword and then started unscrewing this fridge room box thing. It just broke down into wall sections and corner pieces. We had a professional guy taking care of unhooking the cooling unit and sucking the freon out of it and whatnot and we just did the heavy lifting. I just thought that was pretty fun and interesting. The things you learn on your mission eh. When I get back and any of you need help dismantling a big fridge room, then you now know who to call. Other than that we were able to meet with a bunch of less active members and just offer some help. One lady was doing pretty well coming back to church and then we didn't see her for like 4 weeks and so we stopped by and she had been sick so we gave her a blessing and we hope to see her next week. Stake conference was this weekend and it was pretty good. My only issue is that they had a man speak who only knows spanish and so they had an interpreter and they alternated, the man speaking a sentence and then the lady interpreted it in english and that was just a long talk to endure. I could not pay attention to that, especially since the man was just basically reading out of the book of Romans I think and not even expounding upon what he read. I had to resort to one of my favorite church zone out habits; staring at the carpet and letting my mind make up images in the random pattern. We were singing with the stake choir and my companion spoke a bit sharing his conversion story since it was his last Sunday here. Today is just a bunch of packing and cleaning for my companion and I. We are looking forward to a lesson we set though. It's nothing too exciting, just an active great family in the ward but we have tried to meet with them for like the whole two transfers that Elder Miller has been here with me cause this family is the Miller family. It's been delayed and put off cause I'm sure people are just scared not knowing what will result from the awesomeness of The Elders Miller meeting with the Millers. It could get explosive. But I'm sure the saying is true, you can't have too much of a good thing. We were supposed to meet last week and they forgot and took their daughter to the movies instead during that time. Anyway, this week should be good. Normal stuff going on, and I'll find out soon what my new companion will have to offer the area. Mother's day coming up as well, on Sunday I should be able to skype home which is exciting. I hope you all have a great week. Sincerely, Elder F. Miller