January 23, 2011

Hey, hey fam!

Happy Birthday Mom!!! (Tomorrow!) Or in Estonian, that'd be "Palju õnne sünnipäevaks!" Sorry I haven't sent you anything for it :/ Goodness, not even a card! XP By the way, I remember showing a recent picture of you that Marily sent me to one of the members and
they were amazed at how young you looked. Not kidding :D I'm glad you like the white Lion bars though! There a fairly new flavor, but I like them too. Actually, it's been quite a while since I last had one. I need to fix that :) A lot of the candies are in English on the front and then in tons of languages on the back. Last week, I had the European equivalent of an Almond Joy... except it was missing the almond..so where's the joy in that?! Hehehehehe :P Rachel's going to
Hong Kong?!?! Is she Cantonese-speaking then? So cool! No word from Sis. Aitken yet though... I wonder if Pres. and Sis. Dance know what's happening. Oh that's right, we have Zone conference next Thursday, February 3rd. I don't know if we have a set temperature limit for our mission (for determining if it's too cold to tract). We've wondered about it, but thankfully is hasn't been completely miserable...at least not yet! We'll see :) I think in the winter, missionaries mostly like to go knock the huge apartment buildings so if they can get into a stairwell, they'll have a warm place to knock a dozen or so doors.

I got a letter from cousin Chaz this week. He's still just a goof, but he seems to be doing all right and enjoying it, so I'm happy for that. How's Brian doing in Germany? Mark and Marily also sent me a b-day package and I went ahead and opened because I read it had a t-shirt and earrings... I wanted them :) The shirt is especially cute because it says "Somebody in Mesa love me" Awwwww, pwecious~ They even sent me some decorations, but we'll put those up when that time comes :)

We played tennis last P-day, so that was fun, although I'm pretty terrible at it. I'll be honest, having a district of 2 Elders and 2 Sisters does make everything kinda seem like a double date..which is kinda awkward... but at least Elder Barney and Elder Aardema are really fun. Wednesday was kind of a mini-miracle day for us because we finally got a hold of an inactive who's often in and out of the hospital. We committed her to read with the branch for their Book of Mormon challenge and we'll try to visit with her again this week. After that we went to a second-hand store where a lady works at, whom we contacted a month ago. We tried to go during the holidays, but she was really busy. On Wednesday, we went in and her co-worker/boss?, a stern-looking Russian lady told us to sit and chat. We were a little nervous, but it turns out she had attended our church a long time ago when there were still Russian missionaries here and she said she really admired some of our characteristics. We kept waiting for her to say some big objection...but it never came! I think she'd reallylike to come to see what our church is like now. As we chatted, a shopper came to check out and she asked us about the Book of Mormon. She said she has read the Bible a lot so she feels she has it pretty memorized and she's read the Koran too, but she's wanted to read the Book of Mormon. *GASP* Yes!! We gave her one on the spot and she was about to dig out her wallet again to pay us but we insisted that it was free. Sheesh, that place was like a jackpot or something! I hope we can contact them again soon because we didn't get their phone numbers, but they have our contact cards... I think it helped that we baked a lot of cookies to give to people that day! Maybe we'll have to do that more often. Bake our way into peoples' hearts~

Friday was game night and Aili brought 2 of her grandkids. Kadri is 8 and Indrek (who's living in her apartment now) is like 17 or something. He kinda seemed like a punk the first time we met him, but he seemed to really enjoy himself at the game night so we felt kinda bad for judging him. We had the Sonntagg family from Tallinn come down so that was really fun! They're actually Americans, he works in the Embassy up there, but he was recently put in the Mission
presidency, even though they'll be moving in a few months. They have5 kids so they helped fill in the congregation since a lot of the ladies were sick this week and couldn't attend. I even helped translate for Sis. Sonntagg and some of the kids in primary :) And we even found out that she grew up in Mesa, went to Mt. View and lived in the Groves. So yeah, right across Brown from us!! Small world~ha ha !

This last week in our Book of Mormon reading challenge was fantastic! I even read a little ahead because it was hard for me to stop. I think I read from the end of 2 Nephi until Mosiah. I'm starting to get a little underline crazy because there are so many examples of the faith, charity, and diligence in the scriptures.

Well, it's about time for me to go now! Thanks for all the love and updates! You're the greatest.

Much love,
Courtney