Elder Samuel Burge: I haven’t been fired yet

Aloha!~ (I tried that during my opening remarks at district meeting and nobody laughed, it was pretty awful.)

It's been a pretty good week- still getting adjusted to my responsibilities of being the district leader, but it's not too bad. The pay is awful though! My first district meeting seemed to be fairly alright. Nobody apostatized from the church and I feel like people got some good insights/revelations from the training we kind of put together last minute so all in all it's gotta' be pretty okay!

So I really like my district, they're all really great missionaries and I enjoy all of their personalities (which is good). Makes it really easy to be charitable! We have the biggest district I've ever seen or been in with a total of sixteen missionaries! The biggest I've seen has had, like, twelve. Every ward in the district has at least two sets of missionaries, and ours has three. Everybody seems to be obedient and diligent so I haven't had to thrust down the iron fist of righteous dominion- I do however exercise unrighteous dominion by making several of the missionaries refer to me by my official title "District Leader Elder Burge". Gotta' have a little bit of fun with the responsibility I've got now.

I really like the Aloha 2nd ward- specifically the area. There's tons of bike lanes everywhere, so biking isn't nearly as hazardous. There's actually some food-trucks in my area as well! They're all Mexican, but I really like Mexican food now (used to not like it back home so much, but now I really love it). What's pretty awesome is we have a MAX station on the border of our area, and the T.V. highway (which runs through part of the southern region in our area) have a lot of people so I've done quite a bit of street contacting! I really enjoy street contacting- gave out a Book of Mormon to this really nice guy from Mexico! It was awesome. We have a lot of people that speak very little English here in the Aloha 2nd ward, so I think I might pick up a bit of Spanish by the time I'm through here.

My companion, Elder Freshour, is awesome! He's SUPER diligent and we get along really well. We've had some pretty good jokes already so I think it's going to be a good six weeks! He's from West Virginia- that's pretty unique as well.

I like the people we're living with, the Read's. They're pretty funny people- got a pretty dry sense of humor but they make me laugh. Plus Brother Read makes a pretty killer loaf of bread too! (Mom, your bread still reigns triumphant as the best homemade bread I've had! Yours will always be my favorite.) The attic is pretty small, but it's growing on me. Occasionally I'll try to stand up too much and smack my head against the ceiling- but it's kind of fun to say that I live in an attic! Very unique!

Silas is taking some weird classes. Specifically aquaculture and horticulture. I can understand some about the flower class, but the aquaculture class I can't figure out. He knows it's about fish, right? Well, I think that his other classes sound pretty sweet though! I'm glad that he's taking a film class and a drawing class! He's a creative guy so I can imagine once he'd hone is drawing skills he wouldn't be too shabby. Anybody can learn to draw, I think. You'll have to send me some pictures of things he's drawn so I can see them. Interesting he's taking computer repair and networking- I think those are some cool classes to take. Finally we can get our computers set-up to play video games with having Ben around (and he'll have somebody who can help him with all his homework).

Yeah, church dances can be pretty interesting. I bet there was some really fun people there, but I'm glad that she dislikes the ballroom dancers as much as I did. They just take up the whole front of the cultural hall and do the same basic waltz to EVERY song. Once we had some kids start break-dancing in the a circle and that was pretty sweet! Glad she enjoys them though, but remember... BOOK OF MORMON DISTANCE APART!!!~

Well, maybe someday the epic battle for air quality will cease. Or dad will eventually have to retire, right? Sorry dad, but I think you'd just end up retiring before people stopped having strong opinions about air quality and stuff.

Well, I'm going to go buy some groceries now. Maybe plot out ways I can continue to reign in tyrannical horror in the "Beaverton Oregon West, West District". (really rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?)

-"District Leader" Elder Samuel A. Burge