Transfer Madness

Thank you so much for all of the Birthday wishes and for the package! That's so nice of all of you guys to think of me during my birthday. 

Well you know how much I hate attention so I had a picture perfect birthday! Friday night I drove up to Wasilla to go on exchanges with the Zone Leaders there so the good thing was that no one knew it was my birthday until a few minutes ago when I opened my birthday package haha. My plan and goal of flying under the radar and not having anyone find out was perfectly executed so I was a happy camper :) Thank you so much for the scriptures!!! They're perfect and exactly what I wanted! Also I don't know how you read my mind but I've been totally craving smores so I'm pumped to have a little s'more party this week!

Hahaha sounds like a picture perfect lesson you had yesterday mom! What age of kids do you teach? Good thing is I'm sure you pulled it off just fine. You don't even need notes! So since you grabbed Liz's clothes instead of the treats did you give those out? The winter up here has been pathetic. Since there's no snow they had to move the start of the Iditarod up to Fairbanks. They did a ceremonial start in Anchorage but had to haul in truck loads and truck loads of snow and even then the snow was melting.

This past week has been really eventful and so much fun! On Monday the new shipment of missionaries came in so we went to the airport to go and pick them all up. It's so weird seeing all of the new ones come in because it feels like it was yesterday that I was coming off of the plane but then at the same time it feels like it was forever ago! It's kind of a really weird feeling to describe...After the airport we took them to the office to go through new missionary orientation and then took them to the mission home to eat dinner and get all settled in for the night. We slept at the mission home and then the next morning all of the new trainers came and and picked up their trainees and we had a meeting with them! Later in the day we had transfer meeting which was a pretty interesting experience haha! Man I'm pretty bummed that the link I sent you didn't work so you weren't able to watch... next time! I conducted and then later Elder McCusker and I sang for the last time before he was exiled to Sitka so it was fun! All of the videos turned out really good and I wish I could send them to you but they're like 2 GB so I'll have to show you when I get home.

 

The rest of the day we were running missionaries all around the place. At night we had the final bye bye dinner for the departing missionaries and then their last testimony meeting...  at 12:30 at night we went to the airport and dropped them off... holy weird. After the airport we went back to the mission home and got a little bit of sleep then woke up and had to go set up for MLC which is a meeting with all of the Zone Leaders and Sister Training Leaders in the mission. When that ended we made our last run to the airport and things finally calmed down a bit... Holy cow I've never been so tired in my life. 

Saturday like I said I went up to wasilla on exchanges which was a blast! When Elder Ballard came to our mission he really focused on talking with 10 new people every day. In Alaska there's really not a whole lot of people of people just walking around town on the streets so we've been getting pretty creative haha. My new favorite thing is getting people to roll down their windows at stop lights and talking to them or else sometimes we go into stores like Home Depot and walk around acting like we're looking to buy something and then just talk to people. We've been able to see a lot of miracles come from it so it's pretty cool!

Well I'm super sorry that this email was super long and boring but there's just been a ton going on! 

Mom to answer your questions I'm not in the office (thank goodness!) They don't really have missionaries do that anymore and mostly just have Sr couples come in and do that. Most of our time we spend traveling around the mission and going on exchanges with other missionaries. This transfer I think we're going on about 20 so I'm only with my comp Elder Babb like half of the time. It's a lot of fun though! Next week we're flying up to Fairbanks and then driving down to Soldotna and Kenai and then the week after that we're flying down to Junea and Ketchikan (islands in the South East) so it's going to be a blast! The rest of the time we get to spend working in our area then just helping President Robinson plan trainings and anything else he needs. 

Oh yeah and we found out that we're getting iPads in May so turns out I'm going to get to use them for about a month... I never though I'd see the day!

Love you guys!

-Elder Brown