A Mantis! A Mantis! A Mantis Tonight!

Hellos.

Last night we had a close encounter with a praying mantis. Elder Gonzalez had a closer encounter than I. He was about to turn on the water to wash dishes, but there was the mantis, sitting on the faucet. He called me out, and we looked at it for a while. It was covered in dust, looked more like a weird mutant dust bunny-mantis thing. It didn’t care about us much, too bothered by the dust and cleaning itself. When finally clean we learned something interesting: Mantises (Manti? I really don’t know what the plural would be) fly. We got it on the ground where it finished cleaning itself, then flew back up to the sink. Elder Gonzalez kept trying to get decent pictures of it, but was too scared that it would fly at him. Finally I provoked it and it ran up the wall. We opened the door with the plan to proad it off of the ceiling and to get it to fly out the door. This plan worked rather well. Until, when halfway to the door, the mantis caught sight of the most recent proader, dressed in bright yellow and orange, and changed course. It landed on Elder Gonzalez’s side, and he ran screaming into the bedroom where he began beating himself with a towel. This was a bad idea as that room has no light whatsoever and if the mantis got loose we would never find it again. Fortunately it rode out the storm and stayed on his shirt. I got him outside and brushed the mantis off. All in all a rather entertaining way to end the night.

Yeah, all the pics are gone minus the few that I emailed home. I guess the first third of my mission will just have to live in my memory, no pictures.

The chiropracty is because I told the mission nurse that I was having trouble sleeping in part of stress and a very lousy matress. She reccommended that I see Elder Jarvis, the chiropractor. So, I am. And I’m loosening up. I’m sure you remember how tense and everything my back was before the mission. And I have a nice new mattress to replace the horrible one. Huzzah!

A note of warning from a member in the ward at Estanzuela. Do not clean your microwave oven with steel wool. It will only end with an electrical storm withing your microwave.

I’m beginning to forget about the season change. I read that school was cancelled for Monday, and thought to myself “Huh? But school STARTS today. Hm…. Oh yeah! It’s still winter there, school’s in the middle.” Yes, school here started today. Woohoo! That means I’ve been here all Summer break. Wow.

There is a zone-wide activity this Wednesday. A sort of grand open house type jobby that is happening the same night in every chapel in the stake. And it has successfully helped estrange us from the branch. We were advised at Zone Confrerence, all of a week and a half before the proposed activity. We were supposed to get some sort of public official to come and talk as a hook. We asked the firefighters to come talk about fire prevention and to water the grass for everyone to watch. They haven’t gotten back to us. I very much get the impression that this activity will only be a success for the Zone Leaders. They had been planing with adequate time, and have a speaker (relative of someone) who can come anytime. The firemen can only come at 5 PM. The issue of planning time was brought up at Zone Conference, but the ZLs answered with “What? Don’t you have faith, Elder?” I absolutely have faith in an activity of this sort. But, I also know that for success in this stuff it needs full involvement of the wards/branches. Our branch has refused to participate. Our ward mission leader flat out told us that we couldn’t do it and that he’d talk with the bishop.

Thus is my life right now. We (hopefully) have a baptism this Saturday. Elder Gonzalez has been going around advertising it to everyone in the ward. Before the convert has even had his interview. A rather rash thing to do, I think. But I have noticed that he likes to do things last minute. Especially the important things like baptismal interviews. Oh well, what can I do, he’s senior comp. It’s his decision.

‘Till next week,

Will