Storm Prep in Florida

Hi Mom,

Thanks for the weekly updates.  Do you have any photos of the Sanpete fires?  Those flames sound pretty epic if they were 100 ft high and could be seen from the temple grounds!  Unfortunately, I'm not in charge of the weather, but I would gladly push a little bit of the rain your way.  We have a tropical storm coming up the gulf along the Florida coastline, so we've been getting some steady downpours for the last couple days.  It's actually pretty strange to have these all day downpours -- usually it just rains very hard for 20 minutes and then will be bright and sunny again.   Sister Barry (mission president's wife) just sent us a text this morning warning us of tornadoes and severe storms and requiring us to pick up some water storage and non-perishable foods today, but I really don't expect anything too major.  The word on the street is that the storm is looking to hit up by Pensacola, so we will probably be spared most of the high winds, etc.

This week has been fun.  We had all of the missionaries in our zone do a Red Cross training to be shelter certified, so we're set for lots of possible service opportunities over the summer.  I also got to go on tradeoffs again with another set of spanish elders and had an absolute blast.  We didn't find any spanish people, but we did make a lot of contacts and I got along really well with Elder Jones.  I offered him a position in the inventions department of the future Howell Inc.  =)

We had people coming out of the woodwork over the past few days!  We were able to find 8 new investigators and had 6 investigators in church this week which is something I've never seen. One of them is set for baptism on July 7th which is the same day as a ward social, so we may have a large turn out for the service. We actually had a former investigator come back on with solid desire this week. In the past he had struggled with reading, praying, Word of Wisdom issues, and didn't want to get married so we dropped him.  Apparently last Monday, he sat up in the middle of the night, woke up his girlfriend, and said, "We're getting married and I want to be baptized."  Lol, he was all for just going down to the courthouse and getting married immediately, but she wants to do the usual thing with family and celebrations, so they're planning a wedding right now and we're back on with helping him prepare for baptism.

We had our Elders Quorum President out teaching with us this last week and he had just returned from a trip to Orem where he grew up. He asked if I used to dance with someone named Crystal and I was racking my brain trying to figure out what he meant, when he said he had spoken with the Naylors and they'd told him their granddaughter used to dance with me.  "Oh, hahahah!  You mean Chantel?"  "Yep, that's the one." Chantel's grandparents live in his old home ward in Utah.  Apparently, I made a good impression on them the one time we met, because Brother Williams reports that they hope I resume as her dance partner in the future. Small world, eh?  =P

Well, I've got to go prep some emergency supplies.  Be Prepared!  I didn't become an eagle scout for nothing!  =D

Love ya'll.

Elder M.