Richie Tackles Reno: Week 28

Birthday Banner sent from friends and family!!

March 30, 2015

Hey guys!!

Thank you all so much for the birthday banner and all the little letters with the notes, it was really a fun surprise to get a bunch of little notes from everyone. I have the best family ever!!! (And thank you, Mom, because I know it was probably all most all of your doing!!) I am super excited to use my new Quad for scriptures!!! It is awesome!!

Verduzco took us to dinner on Saturday

My birthday was actually great!! We had 4 investigators at church, including a Mom and her 9 year old daughter her came for the first time!! Her name is Candace. I'm sure you will hear more about her…she is very interested in the church, but she has two twin 2-year-olds who keep her busy. Our church starts at 11:00, which is right during their nap, and yesterday we stopped by her place after church, and she said that she didn't want to come back again because it was too hard on her with the kids. So we will keep praying that she will be able to come back again. It was awesome. We also had a ton of less active members that we have been working with, and so it was a great day. We got to teach the 3rd hour lesson about missionary work and we feel that it went pretty good. I forwarded the little handout we made and went over that with everyone and had them practice with their neighbors. It was actually a lot of fun.

I also discovered a new workout this week...wood-chopping. MAN it gets tiring after a while. We chopped wood for like 3 hours on Saturday morning for a less active member and this man had SO much wood. He had a wood splitter too, but Elder Klingensmith and I were just using axes and sledgehammers and all that good stuff and man I was just exhausted afterwards. And my hands are still super sore from it all too. But it was fun. I also got unlucky because one of the mornings I did the workout with 5 Pull-ups and 10 pushups and 15 squats for 15 rounds...and it was the first time I have done squats in like almost a year...and then the next day we walked probably the most I have on my whole mission. So I was hobbling around like an old man for a few days, it was pretty bad haha.

Driving to Quincy, CA
(California is a lot prettier than Nevada)

But this past week we were able to drive up to Greenville, California and have dinner with the Quincy Stake President. The drive was like 2.5 hours, but it was actually a lot of fun. And President Meyers lives on this awesome ranch...and I think I found what I want to do with my life. President Meyers builds custom homes for a living, and most of his work is building lake houses for the lakes up there in Northern California. And then they have a ranch with like 400 acres of land and a bunch of cattle and stuff. It is classified as a "Hobby Ranch" because it is big enough where they don’t have to hire help, but it definitely keeps them busy. They bought an old ranch house that was built in 1860, but remodeled it and everything. It just seems like

Stake President's Farm

the funniest thing ever. They live in the middle of nowhere, but I think it would be so fun to have a ranch like that and build houses for a living.

Things in Cold Springs are going well. We are just trying to build our teaching pool, and have been spending lots of time out and about and trying to find new investigators. So far not too much has come from it, but we are going to stay diligent.

Stake President's Barn

One funny thing that happened this week was that one morning while we were doing our studies we looked out the window and saw a bunch of people outside in the street - which is really uncommon, because nobody is ever on our street, it is pretty desolate. But we looked out and immediately identified them as Jehovah's Witnesses. And sure enough, we watched one of them come up and knock on our door. We answered it, and immediately he was like "Ohhhhh...uhhhhh" and it was funny cuz he seemed kinda scared of us. But he handed us some little pamphlet thing, and then we of course turned around and offered him a Book of Mormon. He declined, and then we offered to say a prayer with him, and he turned that down too. He was not too excited to see that it was us, and wanted to leave ASAP. We were surprised that he didn’t want to bash with us, because most JWs that I have run into always start bashing with us. But we got a kick out of that. I sent a little video clip as well.

Well that’s about it for this week!! Thanks again for all of the birthday cards and the banner, that was so much fun!!!

I love you guys, hope you have fun in Rosemary Beach!!

Love,

Elder Todd