Letter to Zach - July 26, 2007

July 26, 2007

Zach,

How does it feel to be 15? (Aye?) In six months you’ll be getting your learners permit and tearing up the roads. I saw those pictures of you at high adventure, it looked pretty intense. Did you fall out of the raft at all? The ones I saw had you right in the front. I didn’t get to ask you too much about high adventure on the phone, you really only told me that they stranded you. Which is sweet to just have to to fend for yourself for one night.

I also heard that you got the bike all tuned up, which seemed to work out for you. Dad said you, Kyle and Scott rode at fountainhead the other day. It was probably way better without the chain problem and all the other fixes. I’m probably going to be buying a bike up here sometime soon, even though we have a car, sometimes it’s a lot more convenient with a bike.

Anyway, I’ve been seeing a lot of people carrying around the new Harry Potter book, I’ve managed to avoid hearing anything about it but I’m not sure how long that will last. You need to tell me if it was good. I did hear a little bit about that, but I don’t know of I trust them.

The apartment that I’m living in is small but it’s not that bad, we have a random arch right in the middle of it. The good news is that there was a little guitar here when I moved in, so I have time to play if for about maybe five minutes a day. Also I don’t know if you heard but my companion is English (British). The funny thing about that is in Britain a lot of words we would consider swearing are totally fine, so sometimes he will just break out into searing and other missionaries will just kind of look at each other and be kink of shocked. In fact one time he was calling some Sister missionaries to get their numbers for the week and he accidentally, said “What the hell have you been doing all week”, and she broke into tears. (ha ha)

I basically get up at 5:45 go to the gym, eat breakfast, study, and then start working from 10:00 to 9:30 at night. So I’ve been pretty tired but I’m getting used to it. We’ve finally started to get some actual teaching appointments, so the days have been going faster. You meet all kinds of people doing missionary work, some are crazy and some are really cool. You get all kink of reactions just walking around and tracting. Sometimes people will literally run away into their homes. We knocked on this one door and the guy came running out waving his arms yelling, “no, no, no!”, and then we ended up talking to him for about half an hour. A lot of people are nice though, they will invite us for drinks even if they’ve talked to missionaries one hundred times. We were even in this kind of run down area and we are pretty sure that a couple of fourteen year old girls were taking pictures of us on their cell phones.

I wanted to send you some cool Canadian stuff for your birthday, but I couldn’t find any. So I went into the CD shop, I was looking in their clash DC’s for the one you were looking for last time, but they didn’t have it (Canadians (snakehead)), but I saw this one and I was like “that’s just as good”. I’ve never heard of this one before, so you’ll have to tell me if it’s sweet. It’s deerhoof so I’m guessing yes.

Anyway, I hope to hear from you soon and I hope your having fun your last summer before high school, and I remember high school being so much better than middle school.

Love, Josh