Greetings From San Jose

Good Tidings of Good, Well we had a great week. Especially the weekend. On Saturday we joined along with the young men in the ward to do service for a less active lady who lives in the hilly part of Santa Cruz and she keeps a few horses. The duty was to tear out this cinder block retaining wall on one side of her small horse arena. The job was made pretty easy by the fact that the young mens president in the ward has his own construction company and brought along a little skid rider CAT thing that did all the hard work. By pressing down on the wall with the bucket of the CAT he collapsed it for us and then us and all the young men went to work with sledge hammers and busted up the cinder blocks a little more to be dumped at another members house. But the CAT would scoop up all the rubble and dump it in his hauling truck. So we just had to smash and shovel a bit. I'm not sure if they are going to replace the wall but he had us slope the wall of earth so that it would cause water to run off much easier and not collapse or avalanche down. I have like one particular spot in my back that is sore and I think it's from when I was using the pick ax to lever out the foundation of the wall that we had torn down. The base of it had stayed encased in the hillside a little bit so I had to dig behind it with the pick ax and wrench it out. Pretty efficient but tiring. We also that day had the opportunity to go to an Eagle Scout Court of Honor for the Stake Presidents son. We were invited cause they like us I guess and also there were supposed to be some non-members there for us to meet. The thing got started late and we figured we'd have to cut out early cause we had an appointment with an investigator the next hour. When we first showed up there was this older gentleman on the front row who called us over and then started asking us a bunch of questions saying that his wife was a member but he was not and he never got straight answers out of her and so he'd like to ask us about the church. I think his first question was to ask if the whole white shirt, dark pants, and tie ensemble was a uniform that we had to wear. Then he asked what the deal with tithing is, saying that his wife pays but she doesn't make any money, so I told him she must be donating 10% of his money, and then he asked us if Mormons don't believe in dancing. He was a pretty suspicious character so I asked for his name and he said he'd be reluctant to do that cause then we'd know that our whole discussion had been a ruse. Turns out he was the Stake Presidents father, who had been himself a stake president and a mission president over the Salt Lake City Mission. He was a super nice old guy and we go to sit by him. When the Eagles nest was called we weren't going to go up cause we knew we'd have to leave part way through, but they practically forced us up and it actually was no treat having to sit in the hot sun unprotected and no back rest, when before we had been standing under a shady tree. We ducked out early though and went to our appointment only to find our investigator wasn't home. We pretty much just have one investigator at this moment. The one I just spoke of above we have met with a number of times and her interest is slight but she reads from the Book of Mormon and agrees with what we say so we're still trying to figure her out. She missed our appointment cause she was in the hospital. Man, some guy just came up and started asking a bunch of questions and used up all my time talking to him. Have a good week everyone. Sincerely, Elder F. Miller