Week Four

Like I probably told you I live in a 4 man apartment now, which I'm not enjoying that much.  All my roommates irritate me in very specific ways and sometimes it gets really hard to stand.  I'm just glad they respect my stuff and don't go through my food or anything because I was actually worried about that when I got here.  I'm also glad that I'm allowed to just walk out and wander around the apartment complex if I want to.  And I also just today created a little song in my head to the tune of "I'm trying to be like Jesus".  I call it "I'm trying to Stand My Roommates."

We got new Elders yesterday so I'm officially no longer a new elder.

My zone is still really hard, but I'm learning a lot.  I'm learning how to find and dig through records that date back to the 1500s, and it's not easy... To give you an idea, prior to the early 1800s the only records kept were by the priests in the local parish or village (In England and Wales they have what are called parishes which is like a county to us, and then they have counties which are states to us, hopefully that's not confusing.)  And the priests pretty much just pulled out a piece of paper and just started scribbling stuff down.

But wait, it gets worse.

Prior to the early 1700s, they kept their records in Latin.

WHHHHHHHHHHHHHYYYYYYYYYYY?!!?!?!

So I'm pretty much learning basic Latin now too.  I'ts not too hard, though.  Birth is nati.  Christening is baptismi.  Marriage is matrinonium.  Etc.  The hardest thing I ran into is filius means son, and filia means daughter, but instead of writing out what gender the child being Christened was the particular priest that wrote this particular record just initialed an "F"...Good job.  Good job priest.  That's totally not hard to figure out.

Oh and when they say that John Smith was a popular name in England they are not even kidding.  I found a birth record that was about two pages long, and they were all John Smiths in a certain Parish.  Name your kid something else!...people in the...past... Oh and every girl is named Elizabeth pretty much.
And, yeah.  I'm currently working on a project for filling out a pedigree chart all the way to the 5th generation for some guy named Joseph Henry Sutcliffe.  It's pretty hard.

(You can read this, right?  Yeah I had to find a name on there...)

I got a really short haircut by some other Elders (at least it was free) and unfortunately it made me realize that my hair is indeed already starting to thin.  It's probably only noticeable to someone like me who examines himself in the mirror, but yeah I can definitely tell, which depresses me.

(I got my first free haircuts from some other Elders.  They cut it really short.  And yes I'm thinning.  Oh and this camera blows btw.)

And on Monday our mission went to a trip to the Bishop's Central Storehouse Utah Headquarters thing.  It's where all the other Bishop's Storehouses get their food.  It's gigantic, about 5 Costcos can fit in there.  (It might even be an even crazier number like 15 but I can't remember exactly.)  It's out near the airport and it's pretty new, only a year old.  They also have a lot of cool photography in there to emphasize the fact that this is a very special warehouse.  I took a ton of pictures so I think I'll just attach the entire folder.

I'm currently reading through the New Testament for my first time and I'm enjoying it a lot.  (I know I'm supposed to be reading through D&C but I'm already well acquainted with that.)

And I'm still pretty good at shopping even though I'm pretty much living off of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches  ginger ale, and pizza rolls.

(This is the view I have every Music and the Spoken Word, it's pretty good.)

(This is how close I sit to Lyod Newell.  Unfortunately my camera is really sensitive to movement, so it looks like it was taken in that plane of existence you enter one you put on the One Ring.  Also, I really hate this camera.)

(The new view from my apartment.  Isn't it beautiful?)