10/10/11

I´m not that skinny. Though I had to buy a new belt. And it averages around the third or fourth notch. But I think I´m pretty stable at the moment.

We had plenty of food. Just not the yummy kind. I didn´t want to make any rice, since we didn´t have any soy sauce. And I didn´t want to cook any pasta, since we had nothing with which to make sauce. So we went to Burger King instead that day. And we bought food the next day.

I said we could just eat steak when I got home instead of Christmas presents. And I´m too old to celebrate birthdays.

If you must, I do have a difficult request. I need special custom pen leads. You´re looking for Pentel ¨Multi 8¨ pencil leads (they look like color sticks with a metal piece on top). I need red, light blue, and orange. They´re probably ten dollars each.

I actually had figured that was what was going to happen. So I wasn´t too surprised when I opened the letter. That´s pretty much how it happened to Grandpa Seth-they called him while he was on vacation to the same spot.

The weather has mellowed out quite a bit. We mainly just leave the AC unit in the bedroom on ´Fan´ during the night now, just to keep the air circulating. The apartment was pretty messy-we had a ´New Schedule´ we were trying out last week, but it kinda short-circuited when we got to talking and missed the full time for cleaning. So we half-way cleaned and then had to do a bit more this week. The wood floors are a pain without the proper cleaning tools. The brooms aren´t ideal for that surface, nor is a normal mop. We may be making an investment in a real dust mop.

No, we don´t leave Gandia very much. We´re on the train normally once or twice a week.

It was an interesting week this week. On Friday morning I woke up to find our phone saying ´SIM Card rejected, validation failed¨. That in and of itself was fine. We´d been expecting that the switch from our old Vodafone cells would be happening soon. So I grabbed the new phone, put in the Movistar card, and received a ¨SIM Card rejected, validation failed´. message. That wasn´t good.

When we went out, we went to a public phone place, and I called the office. It turned out that we should have received two cards, one of which should have worked, but we only received one card, which didn´t work. That was all they could do for us. So we spent the weekend without a phone. They´re going to have a working card for us in Valencia tomorrow, I hope. When I called Elder Allphin to ask if he´d had a chance to talk with President yet over something, he´s like ¨Yeah, President´s been a little busy and out of town lately...and his phone doesn´t work.¨. Apparantly half the mission was left without a phone. The switch definately could have been managed a little better.

It was interesting doing missionary work without a phone (we don´t have landlines). Not a whole lot happened, to be honest. We just kept joking about it for the most part. ¨You have the phone?¨ ¨Yep! Not like it´s matters!¨. Followed by good chuckles as we descended in the elevator.

I´m sure the booboo remembers me. I´m pretty hard to forget. And I´m sure my cat will just claw me in the leg for having abandoned him for so long.

So, last week I used a recipe we had in our cook book to make Texas Sheet Cake. It didn´t turn out ideally, because we don´t have a real-sized cookie sheet (no, don´t send one), and I didn´t have the vanilla to make the frosting (it turns out that vanilla is kinda hard to find here). So we just made a second cake today, and we´ve got the vanilla this time to make the frosting. I´m planning on offering a few slices in a district meeting tomorrow as a prize.

I hope you all have a tranquil week, and that things go well. Have fun.

Bradley.