here you go!

11/25

Dear Everyone, Happy Thanksgiving! Thanks for all your emails and letters. Sorry Mom, but you weren't the first person to send me a holiday card like you hoped. :) Still, thanks so much for it. Congrats on your new calling Dad. I guess Bishop liked you, Bro Johnson, and himself being together too much to let you get away from them. Tell Kiley thank you for her picture and that I love her too. It sounds like you've got a fun outing planned at the cabin for Thanksgiving. Let me know everything that happens and send me a picture or two as well if you can. I've got all the family pictures hanging up on the wall next to my desk by the door and it's fun to look at those pictures when I read your letters from home. Well, I'm finally settling down into the routine of things here in Texar. Because it gets dark around 6:30 people always think it's late when we go around knocking doors even as early as 7 or 7:30. So, we try to do all our tracting during the afternoon and early evening. We've really only got a small window between when people are actually home from work to answer their doors and when people decided it is too late to open their doors. But, whenever we have appointments that fall through we often end up trying to tract that area if we haven't already worked it so sometimes we end up tracting all the way until 9:00. We had something interesting happen the other night when we were tracting at about 8:30 or so. We knocked the door and a woman said, "Come in." (Surprisingly a fair amount of people do that here. You knock the door and they either shout come in or we have a conversation like this: "Who's there?" "The Missionaries!" "Who?" "Church people!" Then, people either shout to us they're not interested or they actually make it all the way to opening the door to tell us they're not interested. One time, we actually had about a 3 minute lesson about Prophets through a lady's door because she told us she was listening, but wouldn't open the door to hear us.) Anyway, to make a long story short, this woman ended up being a member of the RLDS church and said her dad used to be a preacher in it for about 40 years before he retired. She was in the process of moving and so we offered to come back and help move it into the truck on Friday. She told us we could and that her dad would be there and would probably love to talk with us. As we left Elder Wilson and I were wondering what it would be like to teach a member of the RLDS church. You don't just bash with the Bible, but with the Book of Mormon too. :) No, but we really are wondering how we would teach someone like that. Most of their beliefs are the same and this lady even brought out this old wood-bound quad-combination that she had. Anyway, it'll be interesting. Things are still going great. We actually taught a couple lessons in Spanish this week to some people we tracted into and we've got a couple return appointments set up for this weekend and next week. To answer some of your questions Dad, we have our own washing machine and dryer so we just do that in our apartment. It's rained a couple more times since last week so that's always fun. The first two weeks I was here we only had a few meals with the members, but this week we've got had a dinner appointment every night because of the Holidays which has been nice. So far we've got two meal appointments set up for Thanksgiving, but we might have more if people call us. The Texar Elders who work the Arkansas side have six lined up so they're not too worried about what they'll be doing all day. I'm pretty sure we won't be trying any tracting on Thanksgiving. We might get everyone in town mad at us if we did. When we don't have member meals we just cook on our own. I've made myself some breakfast burritos a couple mornings and some pancakes or waffles a couple others using a mix, but usually I just have cereal. I've actually made rice a couple mornings too. We usually don't have as much time to eat in the mornings because we end up excercising into our breakfast time since it takes a little time to get down to the park where we run. For lunch and dinner I've been making some quesdillas or sandwiches most of the time. I buy apples and yogurt to eat all the time too so don't worry about me not eating healthily. :) Each week I buy something new to put on my sandwiches. I've worked my way up to bread, meat, cheese, lettuce, and mustard. Maybe next week I'll buy some onions and make some carmelized onions. I'll probably get some beans to cook today as well. We'll see. Up until now I've had a macaroni and cheese free mission. I'll probably try to keep it that way or at least try not to make it a daily meal. If you have any other ideas for foods I can make fairly quick that would be great. I'll write again next week and I hope you all have a great Thanksgiving! Tu hijo y hermano, Elder Bradley Bishop