New companionship

Braided herself....

Sinclair Dinosaur!!

So far so good! I've been in a pretty good mood all around all things considered. Still not sleeping well, but hopefully the mattress pad I'm buying today will make my bed a little less rock hard. Getting up is hard and staying awake is harder sometimes.    

            I'm getting sick. ):

Go team Scout! :) I miss scouting.

So far so good as a trainer. The Lord sent me a sister that's practically trained already (yay!).  So far so good with Sister Marsh!  While she was going to college in SC, She's 22, so not a youngin! She earned her bachelor’s degree from a South Carolina school (can’t remember which one). Before her mission, she went out a lot with the sisters, and even attended some of their meetings. So she had a pretty good idea of what to expect. She's very obedient and outgoing. She handles door approaches super well- way better than I did - who pretty much never opened my mouth at a door in the beginning. Which is especially good, since we've pretty much only been finding.

The weather has been good so far; hanging out in the 70s and 80s, though it’s a mite chilly in the mornings and at night.

We have smashed a lot of spiders lately, and they are significant in size. I'd appreciate it if you'd send some pictures and some descriptions on what the local spiders are like (since I can't look them up myself) in the next email, so I know if I should feel bad if I'm smashing them or not. S. Dilworth used to be able to ID them for me and tell me if I should crush them or not... Without her, I pretty much just murder the local wild life indiscriminately. I would also appreciate if you would look up if millipedes are poisonous or not. They're always everywhere in the mornings in the apartment and apparently leaving their smashed brethren around does nothing to dissuade them from continuing to visit us for breakfast. It might explain the random bites I keep finding all over my legs (even where I normally have boots protecting me)... They look like mosquito bites, but what do I know. ( Mom looked up spidery info – EW! – and printed out info for local spiderage and millipedes. Again….EW!) (some scary spiders – rare brown recluse, black widows, and garden varieties…. millipedes are harmless – they don’t bite and have wandered indoors by mistake.)

Nothing particularly exciting to report- just lots of doors closed and a few people who didn’t tell us immediately to hit the road. If nothing else, we're learning to perfect our door knocking technique. I just hope we find a bunch of people to work with before snow time. I don't like knocking in snow time and no one else likes us knocking in snow time either. ):

The Sister Training Leaders gave me a GPS- they apparently just had one laying around that they weren't using. So far so good with it, but we're going to see if we can get it updated for a reasonable price by a member (since we can't get on their website to do it ourselves) and the money you sent may go to that.... Iowa City has had a ton of building done in the last few years and even a 5 year old GPS struggles sometimes, so... Also get to try and find the AAA so we can get more recent maps as well.... But the GPS can't find it (what?). It’s a beautiful example of how we need to invite the members to assist us in the work.

Attached- I managed to Dutch braid my hair into a crown! (I would have never guessed she would do that.) I was so proud. Also attached is a dinosaur we found. I guess the Sinclair Gas stations out here sometimes have these by their little station. Too amusing not to take a picture. (such a tourist!)

Thank you to everyone for your prayers for her…