Brian Letter 2-24-05

Subject: From Brian

Hi y'all,
Yah, last week was a little confusing with the email. I have no idea why they weren't working, I was sending them to the right address but they must not have made it out of my system. Myldsmail is a little gimpy... but it's better than nothing.

It was really nice today to see 13 messages waiting for me, I really liked hearing from Shannon and Julie especially and I got a nice letter from Sister Nye, and Uncle Don. It pretty much made my day today :)

Everything is about the same as last week, still working with marriages and divorces. We ran into a couple of seventh day adventists, and they liked to argue with us. That was a little surprising to me because most Hispanics around here are supposedly Catholic and don't really know their scriptures very well. We don't meet many protestant Hispanics. We're going to teach them a regular lesson next week, but we don't really know what to expect. They'll probably try to argue the same thing as last week, and that would be lame. We'll see what happens. We talked to some other Elders who had visited them, and they already had a few arguments about 6 months ago.

North Carolina actually isn't all that pretty yet. The weather is warm, but we don't have quite enough sun, at least not consistently. The trees are still bare, and there aren't really any flowers or anything yet. I hear in the summer it's really really green, I hope I get to be here for that. I'm starting to like Charlotte more and more, I will definitely have mixed emotions when my visa comes. My companions are great, but sometimes Elder Frost likes to take breaks. That's a little frustrating because we don't really have time for it. Elder Gordon and I both want to stay out of the apartment as much as possible, but it's a little bit of a struggle. This is Elder Frost's last transfer, and Elder Gordon has two more (and President Noel told him he's staying here until the end), so if I'm still in the states when Elder Frost leaves, I will probably stay in the same area with Elder Gordon. I think that would be really awesome, and I can see us getting a lot done.

Spanish is coming still. It gets a little bit easier every day, and I found that the more I study in the morning, the better I speak throughout the day. I never knew Isaiah would help like that! I have been studying Isaiah in Spanish, and he uses so many metaphores, I learn some good vocabulary from that, and of course just using the verb conjugations helps. I don't dislike it as much as I used to, I wasn't really very excited to find out that I would be speaking Spanish, but it makes sense to me now, and it's kind of starting to sound nice too.

One piece of bad-ish news: I burned my arm on a bare light bulb the other night, so it blistered up pretty bad. I've been trying to be careful with it, but this morning after my shower, I had my bandage off, and I accidentally rubbed my arm against a chair, and all the skin just came right off. It was weird. It doesn't hurt very bad, but it's still kind of a bummer, it will leave a scar for sure.

I think it's funny that Shannon is getting married on Friday the 13th. One time CHS swept the marching band awards on Friday the 13th. It's not always unlucky :) I'm super excited for you Shannon!

Well, that's all I have time for, we have a lot of shopping to do today, and a few other errands. I'm happy and healthy, and I'm doing my best here. I love you all!

Love, Elder Harris