Elder Huntsman LeBaron, Church Service Missionary

Here it is with a couple names: Elders Barfuss and Lee are the assistants to the Wrights, the senior mission couple that watch over us. A.K.A. the mission grandparents. You can't see him in the picture, but the third assistant is Elder Thunder, who is Elder Lee's service dog. If you don't know Elder LeBaron, I'm disappointed. Elder Hickerson is the trainer over communications, which is the level I'm at right now. He has pretty bad social anxiety, if I'm reading him correctly (he acts rather similarly to myself), but is a HUGE nerd. He was wearing the Hufflepuff scarf you see in the picture on my first day and it's how I knew I was going to be right at home. He plays D&D in a group with some of the other missionaries too, which is cool and a consistent conversation point during non-service hours. Sister Dearing is the choir director and one of the higher up trainers. She also keeps a quote board of funny things she hears miss...

So, looking at a calendar, I have spent three weeks here. I'm not sure if I believe that, it feels like it's only been two... (Although, to be fair, starting my first mission email before the mission even began didn't really help my consistency of counting.) In other news, it's been very, very eventful. The transit saga continued this past week when, after its second journey, my new, goldenrod bike got dual flat tires. It wouldn't have been that big a deal if Walmart hadn't sold me a bike with a tire size that literally doesn't exist. I'm still not sure how they even got it. It's not like you can get replacement tires for the 27.5" x 1.75" size exclusively from Walmart or something. They literally don't exist. I couldn't even find them on Amazon. I ended up just exchanging the bike. Having learned, somewhat, from my previous struggles. I preemptively bought replacement inner tubes. Good thing, too, becaus...

Good morning one and all. I am surprisingly exhausted, given that my assignment is basically to type all day every day. Apparently there is just as much to be said for mental exertion as physical exertion. Who knew? I think first things first I need to share that I changed my desktops: I got informed that Iron Man and Doctor Strange are against the rules, sadly, so while I once cycled through a prodigious library of mixed family and superhero photos, now it's mostly just the twins, with an occasional family photo. I would attach some of them, but many feature a brother who shall remain nameless in a very much shirtless situation, so you're stuck with just a couple baby photos. After I progressed from Information Processing to Communications, I got assigned to the Book of Mormon comparison project. Some time in the nineteen eighties a BYU professor decided that he wanted to compare all of the print editions of the Book of Mormon word-by-word...

Well I survived four days. It's practically a miracle. The way that the mission I'm in works (at least at the moment, there are some changes on the horizon) is each service missionary has to progress through six skills in order: Information Processing Communication (10) Research (20) Production (30) Project Coordination (40) Leadership (50) Obviously, as a brand new missionary, I started in IP. The way you advance is to earn a certain average number of points in each skill across a four week period, which right now for me includes three weeks before I was on my mission. In IP, there are two ways you can earn points - you can complete "Add Information"s, where someone sends in an error report through the Gospel Library app and you clean up the report so that it's easy for the repair people to understand quickly, or you can tag photos from this massive library of photos that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (speaking of...