We Moved...Again!

Well this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone but we moved again this past week. Out from one basement and into another one. Still don't have anything really to complain about though. The generosity of the members lending out basically small houses to us is awesome to see. The nice thing about our new house is we are again living in the middle of an apple orchard and we have some killer views. I think the best view though is out the front door to the soft serve ice cream machine. Yes, you read that right. Soft serve ice cream. All day and all night. Waffle cones and an extra 20 pounds here I come.

In all seriousness though this was a pretty good week in terms of the normal things we do. On Tuesday we drove down to Kennewick to go through the temple. The member that took us volunteers in the temple as a temple worker on Tuesday mornings so we left Manson at 3 AM. Surprisingly enough the 2:15 wake-up call wasn't as bad as I had imagined. It was just like high school all over again. Since he had to be there by 7 and our session wasn't until 9:30 we had a bit of time to kill so my companion volunteered us to clean whatever we could. It was pretty cool though because we got to go under the baptismal font. Even mechanical rooms in the temple are nice. Only the best for the Lord I guess.

This Friday we also got to help some of our investigators thin apples. If you remember a couple of months ago my last companion and I helped a member plant an orchard. Well this time we fast forwarded in the tree process a couple years to when it started bearing fruit. Since it’s a commercial orchard they want the apples to be as big as they can so the workers go through and "thin" the tree of apples, which is going through and removing 'excess' apples so that there is space enough between all the apples for them to grow sufficiently large. We only spent two hours and it was not physically demanding, but it was more repetitive than "run it back, do it again" (thank you to those of you who got that). I was convinced I was going to dream of apples for days to come. Thankfully I haven't (yet) but let’s just say that if my parents hadn't told me I was going to college, this sure made me want to even more.

Now for the more unfortunate side of things, we were driving along the road doing our thing and my window was down, enjoying the cool evening breeze. So imagine my surprise when all of a sudden I hear this loud smack and then a little black thing bouncing off the frame of the window. I was thoroughly confused until I looked back inside the car and saw a single, solitary white feather slowly float down and come to rest on the black dashboard. The only thing needed was some sad violin music and it would have been straight out of Hollywood.

So on a happier note this quote comes from Sunday School yesterday. I won't be able to quote it word for word but when the member said it all I could think of was me and my two brothers growing up and how hard it would have been for my mother.

"Sometimes you see kids do things that would make it hard to love them if they were someone else's kids."

Having done my fair share of stupid stuff, I can attest to that fact. For some reason my parents still kept me around. 

And with that I thank my parents for not having strangled sometime in my early childhood and sign off until next week.

Elder Kupferer