Staying in Miami

Dear friends and family:

Transfer calls were yesterday. I'm staying in Miami, with Elder Storm, for another transfer!

We had a pretty good week, with just a few hitches. Our biggest strength this week was we were consistent with getting members out to lessons with us, and so we even improved on that from last week. One of our biggest weaknesses was that our work with recent converts and less actives suffered a lot this week, and got almost zero attention as a result. So we'll be working on improving and balancing out our efforts throughout the week, so that no specific task or group of people gets shafted.

Part way through the week, I started having a large amount of pain in my throat, paired with bad headaches and ear aches that felt like ear infections. I thought that it was strep. When we called the mission nurse, she prescribed a few medications and told me to stay home for three days. I did my best to work things out with other companionships so that we could go on exchanges and continue to get work done in both areas for the days that I was out of commission. I'm back to working now, but I still don't feel 100% better. My throat doesn't hurt like strep anymore, but my headache and ear aches become very distracting when I forget to take ibuprofen to keep it down. If they don't go away on their own in another day or two, I'll call the mission nurse again and get it worked out so that it doesn't become a bigger issue.

This Sunday, we were rounding up our investigators to come to church, and we had a ride set up for several of them. We arrived there to help the investigators get in the car, and we discovered that the car that our member was going to drive them in had developed a flat tire. We weren't sure what to do, but we stayed around and helped him fix the problem, even though church was starting in just a few minutes. We arrived at church 30 minutes into sacrament meeting, and were just barely on time to take the water from the foyer. (There has been several baby blessings beforehand, fortunately.)

One of the investigators who came to church is named Mikerda. She is the 9-year-old daughter of a less-active member (Mikerlange) who was baptized the week before I came into Florida more than a year and a half ago. They all came to church together as a family, and they all really enjoyed it. Mikerda is probably one of the smartest 9-year-olds I have ever met. She's probably one of the smartest investigators I've ever met, in fact. We asked her to read in the Book of Mormon; when we came back, she had read the first six chapters, and she proceeded to describe to us exactly what happened in those chapters, and what she thought it meant. Elder Storm and I are both happy that we're still here together to help her be baptized on the 20th.

Yesterday I tried to cook a meal for lunch. I boiled a bunch of vegetables and fried some chicken, then I combined the vegetables and chicken and fried them together for a little bit. I boiled the vegetables for too long, so they were mushy and came off on the chicken, making it look like I had added pesto or some sort of guacamole. Also, I forgot to season it. I won't be trying that again for a while. :)

Thanks,

Elder Slade