DAYS GO BY

April 6, 2015

Well hello my friends. This week was a fast and good week for us here in good ol' Sweetwater!

First off, I am pumped that Kevin is here in Texas with me and Park-dawg now! We are officially the ERICSON BIG 3!!! Unfortunately though Parker is going home soon so it will just be ERICSON BIG 2 which doesn't make much sense so we will have to be a Medium 2 or something. I just don't see only two of us being BIG. We need a third!

So this week was pretty killer. We'll start off with Zone Conference on Friday in San Angelo. So, the drive from Abilene to San Angelo is surprisingly pretty nice to look out the window at! We traveled early in the morning to get there by 9 so the morning weather just added to the affect! *Shocker warning* There is actually a lot of green between Abilene and San Angelo so it was very pleasant! Anyway, the main focus of the conference is the dreaded "Black Box" that was installed in our vehicles! This puppy tracks our driving! It keeps track of seat belts, speeding, and aggressive driving! But it is actually very fair. It has been three days and it is a very fair device! If you get a violation, you deserve it. And it warns you before it gives you one too. So when you aren't quite paying attention to your speed and you get about 7-8ish over the speed limit it will say "watch your speed" and all you gotta do is take your foot off the gas for a second and slow down and it won't record anything. But it will ding you for accelerating too fast and braking too fast and all that stuff. And there is no warning for those violations. It just says "aggressive driving" and you know you have committed a violation that goes on your driving record. And if you REALLY suck at driving you can lose driving privileges for a transfer or two or your whole mission even. But I don't have to worry. I haven't had any problems with it yet. No violations for me!

During the conference Pres. Heap spent some good time on why we aren't reporting numbers anymore. Usually you would report your daily numbers every night to your district leader who would then report everybody's numbers to the zone leaders. And then you report your weekly numbers the same way as well. Well, over the last month or so we have gone to ZERO number reporting. Pres. Heap says that it worries him sick that missionaries go out and work every day to get numbers, and he said that missionaries have expressed to him that they do that.  Anyway, there's a lot more to it but it was definitely inspired for him to do that because President Uchtdorf basically gave a repeat of President Heap's instruction during Priesthood Session of Saturday night! So if you want more stuff about that, just look up that talk. It is almost exactly what President Heap told us to the word.

General Conference was awesome! Sometimes it takes going on a mission to be engaged in General Conference for all five sessions! I loved it all. We just sat at the church all weekend and watched! For two sessions we were all by ourselves and had only one other person for two sessions and had two others for the priesthood session. We basically made ourselves at home... it was quite nice. One sucky thing though was the internet crapped on us about halfway through Elder Holland's talk. He was KILLING it and we missed the last half. It worked so good the entire session until then! I was not a happy camper. But we were able to get it back for most of Uchtdorf’s talk. So I will have to go back and watch Holland's later!

This week out at the Patton's we washed a horse! Hahaha it was so much fun! We got to spray it down and scrub it all up and had all sorts of fun doing it! They said that the missionaries will be doing a lot of horse washing this summer because they have to wash their horses about every week or two. Unfortunately I most likely won’t get to wash too many more horses, but it was fun while it lasted! But one interesting thing about that was how the water just got dried right up! It is so dry here that the water runoff from the horse didn't make it very far because it just dries right up! The humidity around here during this part of the year is about 10%-15% with high winds! It hasn't been too bad yet but I have felt it when biking. It just dries your mouth right out. It’s no bueno. But I survive. Just gotta stay hydrated! Which I have been doing a very solid job of ever since I got our here. It’s kind of annoying though, I have to go to the bathroom all the time because I drink so much water. But whatevs. We also biked a lot this week which has been nice. I am getting back into the biking shape I was when we were a bike area all that long time ago! And I am getting killer tan! You should see my watch tan line! It is a sight to see! And don't worry, I am wearing sun screen to prevent skin cancer!

Teaching this week was a little slow. We taught this one dude named Christopher. We taught him street side a couple weeks ago (and he lives right across from the high school and it was right when school got out so there were tons of cars driving by... super cool and I felt like a champ) so we went back and retaught him the Resto. It went well but we don't really have a good feel of where he's really at. So that’s a goal of ours. Also we taught this other guy named Spiderman. Haha he is Erica's friend who lives in the same housing complex as she does so he came in so that we could go inside since we need an adult male with us. He is a character but I could tell he felt something and he actually wants to get his life back on track. He actually has some good potential and I hope he actually is interested! That’s pretty much it for this week.

As far as food goes, we had chicken fried pork steak at the Patton's. Sis Patton just had to dig something up so that is what we had. It was quite amazing. This place just keeps surprising me. We also had a very interesting meal at Zone Conference provided by the San Angelo Relief Society sisters. It was modeled after what a meal would have been like for Jesus Christ back in Jerusalem since it was Easter and all this weekend. It was surprisingly very good and quite enjoyable!

That’s all for this week peeps! I hope y'all have a good one and heed to the words that were shared with us by the prophets this weekend!

Love,

Elder Reed Ericson