A slide!

Hey ya'll,

This week was one of the busier weeks I've had since Hollister which is good it means we have people to teach and people are hating us slightly less. I've also officially determined that this area is at least 40 years in the future from NC, there's no way around it. One day we'll catch up, but I hope it's not soon. I love the barbaric ways of normal civilization, it's nice.

We had zone conference this week and that was good. It only went an hour over this time instead of the normal 2 hours, so we almost made it to our appointments on time that night. I enjoy zone conferences here a lot because it is combined with the 2 zones next to us and that's where all except like 2 of my friends in the mission are, so I'll take a 8 hour meeting to see all of them. We talked a lot about humility, which I'm already a perfect master at, so it was an easy few hours...smh We also got new phones there and these are slightly less aggravating as the old ones, but they shortened every single contact into one word. So where before we had 50ish names that started with brother (I.e. Brother Jones, brother Johnson, etc) we now have 50ish "brothers" in our contacts. So that's been super exciting dealing with. 

Tho the most exciting thing that happened this week wasn't really a missionary thing but there's no way anything could top this. So we went to a member's house to eat dinner and teach a family of 4 (who's probably getting baptized so that justified my actions). They asked me to go downstairs and tell the 8 kids, all 14 or younger, to come get dessert, so I said ok. I asked where the stairs were and they said "just take the slide". Yea, the slide! They literally had a slide that went down to their basement. So I'm like flip yea let's do this. I go down this big blue spiral slide and come out on a mattress, next to an indoor basketball court that the 10 year olds are playing on. And obviously I can't say no to a couple kids challenging my skills. So we played 2 on 1 really quick to 11 and I killed them. It's was 11-0 in about 60 seconds. I felt a little bad, but they challenged my manhood and they said I couldn't go easy on them. Me and the 2 kids were talking trash to each other when G walked down the stairs and said we had to go up, and he was probably a little surprised at the scene he walked into. But yea that was the most exciting thing to happen to me in the past couple of weeks.

Also a little kid knocked G's iPad out of his hands and now he has to pay to fix his screen so apparently i bully kids in our ward, and the kids bully Elder Gartside. Interesting to say the least.

I can't think of anything else to talk about, I'll send some pictures later - we're going to Stanford with a friend from Hollister who's driving up to see us - sweet! I still miss the people in Hollister - probably always will.

Love ya'll,

Elder Barker

Stanford