6/28/11

No, I didn´t get transfered. Most of the mission did, but some people had to stay in their area, and I was one of them. There´s going to be nearly fifty of the 100 missionaries in the mission traveling through Barcelona today.

 

So yes, I´ll be here for at least one more transfer. With the way things changed, there´s like one or two areas that will be ´open´ next time, because most of the rest are either my old areas or with former companions (lol). 

 

The mail might be somewhat working now, since I got a letter from the Williams yesterday. But now we´ll be going into the months of ´vacations´, which starts mid July and goes through all of August. Most businesses just close for the whole month (it really doesn´t make any sense).

 

We found an apartment this week, a fairly decent one, so I sent the info into the office as we´re supposed to do...and they haven´t done anything with it. Then Monday the new secretary calls and says ¨hey, have you done this?¨. The office is supposed to do it, but now they´re not going to be taking care of it anymore. I really wanted to hit my head on the desk. So basically I now have to handle the negotiations myself and then the office will only come in when it´s time to sign something. Sometimes...

 

Still, though, I don´t want to sound like I´m depressed, because I´m not. I´m fine. :) 

 

The week did go better. Finally starting to see some results from weeks of effort (that´s always nice).

 

We still don´t have the church, though, because the rentors haven´t wanted to agree on a date when the final property will be ready. They want to do it ¨spanish style´, aka start charging rent and then say ¨oh, yeah, I might have it ready in a year.¨ So it´ll be a few more weeks probably until we´re even in the temporary spot

Well, Elder Plaskett´s getting exiled out to Menorca, so we´ll never see him again (okay, we´ll see him in a few months). So to celebrate his exit, we´ll be going to play ping pong this morning (I´m terrible, but there´s not much else to do but try. I have the usual problem of finesse). Then Elder Jones is getting a newbie, so we´ll have fun picking on him. (hehehehehe). Okay, so we won´t pick on him too badly, but it´s going to be fun to see a child again. They´re usually so lost when they get in the field, and they´ve got a ton of ´greenie pride´, so he´ll be interesting.

 

Hehehehe...selling alarm systems...not a good idea. Most of the kids end up asking their parents to pay for the plane ticket home. Elder Keller was good at it, but very few actually end up making money. They´re real big on hitting either member kids getting ready to leave on missions, or on hitting returned missionaries.

 

Yesterday morning we stripped down the apartment to do a deep clean...even though we´d passed the inspection a few weeks ago with a ´gold star´...yeah there was a lot of dirt. Under the beds we had Inky, Pinky, Blinky, and Clyde and then all their friends in some kind of sick dust bunny party. They´d been multiplying or something, because it ended up being a dustpan full of bunnies.

 

Yes, there really wasn´t the conference issue inside. It didn´t look like it´d been opened either.

 

So on Monday, the head of the building organization (I hate our building) came over to say that he´d had complaints over the noise from the dryer. I personally think the fact that the upstairs neighbors have their kids screaming at 6AM is cause for complaint, and running the dryer during the day is not, in Spain everything is backwards. Kind of like Soviet Russia. (okay, you´re not going to get that one.) (In Soviet Russia, food eats YOU!!). So either way, Elder Plaskett and I decided to perform ´surgery´ on our 1980´s White Westinghouse ¨Made in England¨ dryer. We quickly resorted to kitchen knives and other utensiles to tear it apart. Afterwhich we quickly realized that yeah, it was kind of odd not to have a vent hose, and that the pipe which goes from the lint screen out the back wasn´t connected, so the dryer was filled with lint (fire hazard...boom!). We´re going to see if any store is open long enough today to find the cheap spanish version of WD-40 along with some grease for the motor, then we´ll finish cleaning out the lint, hook it back up and then run it all day.... It should be quieter though. Air dried socks are terrible.

 

No, I haven´t heard anything from Larry in a while. He´s probably busy.

 

Elder Dalton´s been made the district leader, so maybe I´ll end up in Gerona at some point during the transfer. His semi-newbie is driving him nuts.

 

Well, that´s all for this week. I was going to send some pictures and videos home...but the card slot doesn´t work.

 

Love,

 

Bradley.