March 30, 2010- Email

hey hows everything going today? its been another wonderful week here in ardmore. we haven't done to much out of the ordinary its just like my last area if you were wondering tracting and teaching wherever we can. we just have an awesome car right now instead of bikes. lets see you think i got out of yard work???? well guess what we have to do at our house... yard work! but we have a riding lawn mower so its fun. i thought i would get out of it this year but maybe not. yeah it was really hot yesterday in fact it was 81 in ardmore! it was way way hot considering it was 32 last week. and its only going to get hotter here. my companion was saying that it was 113 last summer around here and with like 80-90% humidity. which i hope i have a car for that reason but you never know. i forgot to tell you about our mission conference 2 weeks ago. it was so much fun. elder costa from the seventy came 2 days after transfers. it was a really cool experience he talked alot about faith and confidence. it was an awesome 3 hours. so lets see thats 6 hours with general authorites in the last month and 1/2. how cool is that? me and elder lewis are getting along great. oh did you get our brackets? haha pretty bad i would say! wouldn't you? oh so i have had my worst meal on the mission so far... and it wasn't that it was like weird stuff its just it was all put together and we had to eat it. it was from a crazy sister in our ward... but we go over there and she says sorry i didn't mean to give you that much and its a massive amount of mac and cheese with a side of corn beef and cabbage with a side of turkey chunks and a side of some sort of suasage. so you can imagine how that would all taste but just imagine it about 5 times worse it had some really weird cheese on the mac and cheese and it almost made me puke! so i had to mix everything together and eat it really slowly. lucky for elder lewis he got about half the size of a plate then i did... it was funny we both hated every second of it and got out as soon as we could. luckily we had an apointment right after that. but let me tell you it was not my favorite meal. but on sunday we got some amazing steak! and turkey and potatos. we had two meals :) they both made up for that not so favorite meal. but something that i learned this week was that smoking is really hard to quit. we have a recent convert and we are teaching his girlfriend here and they made a pact that if he quit smoking and chewing tobacco then she would read the book of mormon. i don't know how that all came to be and we were there when that happened but yeah that was the promise. so we taught him a stop smoking workshop that uses 15 steps and turns off the wanting of a cig or chew. ( we teach that to whoever wants to quit its way cool) so we taught him that and if you follow the 15 steps everyday for 7 days your a non tobacco user. so its been 3 days since we taught him that and its going ok. he took one or two puffs off one yesterday because it was to big of a temptation since he didn't listen to us and get rid of every pack that he had. but he said that it was so gross that he didn't want to smoke agian. which was cool. but i'm hopeing that it will stick this time. i didn't realize how strong of an addiction that tobacco is. its a big one. but i think that he can beat it. lets see that about it from ardmore this week. oh i'm learning to play the guitar here. i know a little its pretty cool. well that it. tell everybody hi from me! love yall talk to you next week!
ELDER DOWNS
TE AMO!