July 6th

Aloha,
Its been a very busy week for us out here. There is a Lady, Adria, that the missionaries have been working with for a really long time that we meet with every week. We went over last wed. and she set a baptismal date!! Its not til Sep. 22 though. She figured that you can go to the Temple one year after baptism, and their anniversary is on the 22 so that's when she wanted to be sealed as well. We told her that she could still be sealed on the 22 but baptized much sooner, so we'll see how that goes.
We've also been working with anther investigator, Denise. We contacted her a few weeks ago and began the lessons. Well yesterday was only her second time at church and she got up to bear her testimony. I was really nervous at first because I didn't know what to expect. It was an awesome testimony!! She held up the Book of Mormon and said "This book is changing my life so much" and how she knew it to be true. I talked to her afterwards and she said that she wouldn't have said it if it wasn't true!! It was worth every bit so far on my mission just to hear that and to see her change.
Hopefully we will be setting a few more baptismal dates this transfer and a few baptisms. The Lord has really blessed us, probably more than we deserve. We've been working our hardest and so the Lord makes up for our weaknesses and blesses us with many people to teach.
The weather was really nice last week, but this week its supposed to be hot and humid again. Its alright though, i think i'm getting use to it (if that's possible). The fourth was pretty lame though. It rained most of the day. The ward was going to have a pancake breakfast at a park but with the rain we couldn't. Then we were planning on riding through the different parks to contact everyone that would be out there enjoying the fourth, but no one was there, once again because of the rain. So instead we went tracting. Tracting is never usually successful but on the fourth it was even worse. Everyone was either in St. Louis or not willing to talk with us because they were busy. It was still a good day, just not as good teaching wise. there are a lot of hispanics in our apartments and i usually use my broken spanish on them. they usually don't say much back (gratefully) and we go inside. On the fourth though, we had a member pick us up to take us home. He served in Mexico and so knew spanish. He started talking with some of the people outside and taught them a 30 min. lesson. it was really neat because although we had no idea what was being said, we could still feel the spirit testify to us of the truth of what he was saying. We had to stop tracting/contacting at 6 for safety reasons so the little spanish lesson was good timing. The fourth is a pretty big deal here though. the cities around here have three nights of fireworks displays and on top of that, everyone buys their own and do them throughout the day. Luckily no one tried to shoot us with any (and if they did i guess they missed).
There is this less active lady in our ward that we've been working with. She found out that i was new last transfer and so she had us over for dinner. It was a "green" meal. Literally everything was green. It didn't look to appealing but it tasted fine. Ill send some pics of it but it was interesting.
Tell sister Plessinger that only the best missionaries are sent here to Zion (well not quite Zion but we're close), so be ready.
Dad-We only get an hour for personal study so its hard to study everything that you'd like within that hour and still prepare what your going to teach your investigators. Maybe if you stop working so hard your back would be able to heal better. Just be careful and don't work too hard. I think the last name of the man i met was Evans. Can't remember though.
Josh-that's more than i get to live off of for a month!! How long did you blow up fireworks? With that kind of money it better have been quite the show. Good luck with band, sounds like it will be fun.