Blacker, Dekan

     It was not the best of weeks and it was my own fault. Basically if a missionary is a lazy missionary we call them a sack as in a sack of potatoes. There were 3 separate days where I know I should've just gotten out the door and done missionary work, but I didn't, I stayed inside for some reason. Again, sacking out never leads to happiness.      Other than that, we had our car taken away. Honestly it's probably a big reason why I was a sack. Our car getting taken went something like this, I got a call and the vehicle coordinator said, Elder Blacker your wrist is healed right? Me: Yeeah. Vehicle Coordinator: Good the Sisters want their car back. So now we don't have a car and I don't have a bike because I crashed it, so we've been walking. Basically, we haven't been in the Kayscreek stake since the car was taken, like at all. Not even once. Our relationship with the Kayscreek leadership is rocky anyways. They have a meeting that lasts for 2 hours during ...

      Shout out to Kris for this week's email subject. I worked with him at In-N-Out and that's what he'd say whenever someone said, hey how are you? I truly am living in paradise though, just not burger paradise. Being a missionary is awesome, but not anything super interesting happened this week. Hence, it was just another week in paradise.       We were out and about a lot this week trying to find new people to teach. Nothing. We didn't find a single new person to teach this week and we're supposed to find 5, but that's ok. Each night we went home and I felt like I'd helped somebody out that day. Mostly that meant talking to somebody who just needed somebody to talk to. Whether it was an elderly man who's wife has dementia, a widow who lost her son to Covid, or a mom who was worried about her son because he's an alcoholic, people often just need somebody to talk to. I've found that to be true for me too. Sometimes you just need to talk to some...

     What an interesting week. This week we didn't do as much work. Yet, we still had some of the biggest spiritual highlights of my mission so far, as well as some really fun times.        I'll start with the fun times. This started as a not great day: Elder Titus was sick and so we stayed home the entire day. Titus got up at 2:30pm was up until 5:30 and then slept again until 8pm. Then we played games for the rest of the night. As in way later than we were allowed to be awake, but it was so much fun. We played a lot of games this week, especially Skull King. Skull King is so much fun and it doesn't hurt that I can win a lot of the time. Another of the most fun things I've done in my mission happened at Little Caeser's.        So Little Caeser's has this machine where you put in a quarter and it gives you a bouncy ball and if the ball is the right color, then you win free crazy bread. So, we pooled together all of our quarters and ...

It was a great week. Yes, all that means is I was able to get In-N-Out. I just really like it there, it feels like home.        A tried a lot of fruits for the first time this week. I've always been a very picky eater and so when my companion found out that most fruits I just haven't ever tried; he decided that he needed to change that. I've been a picky eater my whole life, but now I'm learning I'm not actually picky I just more than anything didn't want to give in to what my parents were telling me to do. Which is what happened, I claim victory on this one. Anyways, I tried 6 different fruits and my favorite was pineapple. Um, yeah. If you don't remember I started off my farewell talk by saying pineapple doesn't belong on pizza. Full disclosure, I've never tried it, but my best friend has loved pineapples on pizza so much that, naturally, I took the opposing view. Yeah, now though I'm scared that I'm going to like pineapples on pizza and ha...