Elder Samuel Burge: Got so excited about missionary work that I locked the keys in the trunk.

Hey,

It's been a pretty alright week here in West Linn. I'm just about situated into the apartment and the area. It's a bit overwhelming sometimes when you don't know much of anything about the area. The apartment was really messy and disorganized, but I've been trying to sort through all of it. I'm just about done getting all the unnecessary things out of the way.

There's been a few really solid investigators that we've got, but a lot of the people we try to teach aren't very solid at all. We've had quite a few cancelled lessons this week, which has been a shame. I'm excited though, the ward here has a good focus on missionary work. I've already met a ton of people that are really awesome here as well. Elder Pearson and I get along great- he reminds me a lot of Jordan Steele, actually.

Halloween we'll go about doing the normal routine until about 5 o' clock, then we're going to go out to dinner with our ward mission leader, Brother Bradford, and after that we're going to do our weekly planning the rest of the night. So, no crazy shenanigans on Halloween. I love that candy bowl that you sent me! It's so freakin' sneaky, you think it's batteries are dead it's been still for so long, then you go to grab a piece of candy he lunges out at you and scares the crap outta' you! We're going to take it to district meeting, because we figured out how to make it lunge out (it's light-sensitive) so we shoot its face with a laser-pointer and it goes off.

The ward had a chili cook-off/bake-off on Saturday, and that was really cool. I had some freakin' good chili- and we ended up orchestrating a lot of it (signing everybody in, setting up the tables, and even judging the chili's). I had this one chili with shredded beef instead of ground beef, which was awesome. I'm not a big chili kind of guy, but I really like white, chicken chili's. I'm glad that you guys went to the ward Halloween party- glad to hear that it was pretty alright. Thanks for hazing the missionaries too.

I've been incredibly tired this past week.. I really enjoyed riding a bike, because I got a lot of good exercise and it helps you to know the area better than cruising through it in a car. Now that I'm in a car, my blood isn't flowing and so I'm super tired all the time and I have no idea still where I"m going.

We had a stake breakfast this Saturday, and it was back in Wilsonville (which was really fun). It was really neat being back in my greenie area, and I got to talk all about the people we were teaching with the sisters in the Stafford ward and Elder Schmidt (one of my favorite companions) whose serving in the Wilsonville ward. The work has picked up in both the areas, which is really great. I should have knocked out the apartments in Wilsonville- Elder Schmidt says that they found a ton of people to teach there. Either way though, glad to hear it's picked up for him there.

Yesterday (Sunday), we had a bit of a rough morning. Since everything was in disarray in the apartment- we couldn't find any progress records (which eventually did find), and so as we were leaving the apartment I'd opened the trunk to put my backpack inside and I thought I saw a progress record. Well, it wasn't one and in my excitement I left the keys to the car and apartment in the trunk and closed it... It freaking sucked, I felt so stupid. We walked everywhere in that morning (which I actually really liked), but eventually we had to have somebody drive down from Beaverton to give us the spare key. It was pretty embarrassing.

That was my week. I'm hopeful we can get more work going in this area. It sounded like we'd have more things to do when I first got here, but after getting more familiar with everything it seems like this area needs a some T.L.C.

Well, it's good to hear from everybody. I hope things continue to go smoothly for you all. Let me know how the ward splits- I'm curious to see how that's going to work.

Love always,

Elder Samuel A. Burge