One of the nice things about Wellsville is it's pretty far from the Great Lakes. Because of that it has a really New York cool winter phenomenon that happens every once in a while. It happened this week. I believe you westerners call it "The Sun."
Let's see... Exchanges this week. I went to Bath with Elder Houghton. It was a nice break! Got to meet some fun people. Turns out that the teachers in Bath make over $80,000. Like average teacher. This small house in Bath had to pay like $500 a month in taxes towards property/town tax and stuff like that for the school. I feel like that's a lot of money in just that tax. Those 500 doesn't include income tax or anything. Just to live where they are. I thought mom would enjoy that statistic. Bath is the best school in the county (doesn't say much because of the county...).
We had 16 people at church this week. It was a super small crowd.
Elder Daugs and Elder Gibby while on the exchanges handed out extra brownies from Institute to random college students. Being college students, they all asked them what was in the brownies before the accepted the kind offer. ha!
Talking to a Less Active Member about Olean. This town outside of our mission but pretty close to Wellsville. They apparently have a ton of Squirrel statues. Yes, giant squirrel statues. They have an extra big one in front of the town hall. So he made the comment: "We could either fix the potholes or buy a giant squirrel! So naturally..." It was pretty funny if you knew the guy. He is usually quiet but he jumped in to say that.
Well two area 70's came for our fancy meeting on Tuesday. Whole mission came together. They are changing up a lot with ipads/Internet Proselyting. So here is the quick rundown. I don't have to buy an iPad (SOOOO happy). Because anyone 6 months or less left on their mission doesn't have to buy one. They are going to have missionaries buy them before they enter the MTC soon. You have to buy an iPad (Apple monopoly). But you get to keep it after your mission. This is the point that I am excited that I don't have to buy an ipad for 1) It's an iPad and useless. 2) It will be extremely restricted for the whole mission which extremely reduces it's value. But you get to keep it when you get home. Which over the course of the mission it decreases significantly in value. SO Basically, I'm excited I don't have to buy one. Yay! But I get a loaner for the next 6 months. They are switching all of our iPads up to the new ones.
So with that, there are some other changes. Lots of little things in iPads that are too confusing to explain. They are also very strict on our guidelines. Including what we can put into our areabook as info on people. For example we cannot say "Bob is from Germany." Because that's racist. We have to say "Bob moved from Germany." And if they have any Word of Wisdom problems we have to say "Bob has concerns with the Word of Wisdom." Instead of saying "Bob has been smoking for 10 years." Basically we have to be super vague so the church won't get sued if anyone found out. Also, in our email homes we basically have to avoid all use of names.
We are "restarting" Internet Proselyting. Since we are moving out of the guinea pig stage (us) we are restarting it as they add more missions for a grand total of 80-something. So now they have strict rules regarding that. Mainly they just had a huge long conversation about Pornography which they were very straight forward about. Which I liked. I hate beating around the bush. SO part of the restart is 2 months of "training" on it. SO we are getting kicked off of Internet Proselyting!!! Wooo!!! In 2 weeks I'll no longer have Facebook enabled on my ipad for 2 months. Then Pres Francis gets to decide if we are ready to move on. Which most missionaries are assuming that we'll be out of Facebook for about 3-4 months. WHICH means I am off of Facebook for probably the rest of my mission. Which I'm SUPER excited about. I get to be a real missionary not knowing the outside world! ;) Pretty great! Plus it removes all those struggles of companions on Facebook while we are trying to weekly plan and stuff.... Yay!
So yeah. Some crazy changes with iPads and Internet Proselyting. We also can't teach people from back home without specific permission from our Mission President. Which kind of blows because all of my Facebook success has been from people from back home. Almost all. But, I don't have to worry about that (see above paragraph).
I started the Book of Mormon on Friday night. I'm already almost 200 pages in. I've noticed a lot this time how much my knowledge has grown and how much more I notice things. It's been nice. Even at a quicker pace.
We also hung out with Alfred kids (nonmembers) after a visit with our Less Active Member there. We made friendship bracelets. They were pretty chill with us considering we were wearing proselyting clothes and it usually makes people awkwarded out. That's why I love college kids/my peer group. So much chiller. Everyone is much more accepting of different people.
So we get a call from a telemarketer. I'm bored so I take it. Answer the questions. Win a free cruise. Pretty legit, Eh? So I'm like what's the catch... Turns out there wasn't a catch because they just expect me to come and blow tons of money on gambling and alcohol. Jokes on you, I don't do either! Plus they want you to write a positive review of it and tell your friends. Sadly, however, I had to pay the port tax right there. It was $59 per ticket. And I won two. So it was $118. I couldn't justify spending the impulse by. Plus it didn't include the plane ticket to Florida. And I still wasn't 100% sure it wasn't a scam. So missed out on my free cruise I could have taken for my birthday. Oh well. Ha! I'll just have to win another one. #BahamasCruise
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