Tower Madness!

Dear family and friends!

This week was transfer week. Not a lot changed for me, and I hardly even noticed it was transfer week simply because Elder Parker and I are still together and we have the same roommates. Hopefully we still love each other by the end of the transfer. This week was great and I had a lot of fun!

On Tuesday we got together as an apartment and set some goals; things like respecting each other, cleaning up after ourselves, etc... just so we don't drive each other crazy in the next month and a half. We have some great goals and plans to accomplish those.  One of our goals was called 'scorpion initiation' which is a goal for all of us to hold Dwayne, our pet scorpion by the end of the transfer. We said, “let’s do it right now!” We pulled Dwayne out and passed him from one to another. The worst that could have happened is we could get stung, but none of us did, so it's all good! I'll send a video of it.  Later that night we went to the Christmas lights with one of Elder Parker's recent converts from one of his past areas. Her name is Alexandra. She's about 22 and she either has her call or should be getting it very shortly! It's super exciting that she's made that decision! Now because of her Elder Parker is going to indirectly influence many more people. The Christmas lights were beautiful. I'm not positive about this, but I'm pretty sure the Mesa temple has more lights than Salt Lake does. It's a lot more amazing than Salt Lake anyway.  Plus there's about half the amount of people! It's awesome!

We went to transfer meeting on Wednesday for Elder Parker to hand out some more of his t-shirts. The meeting was really good. The biggest thing I got out of it was something President Jenkins, our mission president, said. He said, "you can't fake preparation." He told us about a missionary not training for the 5k and how he was about ready to die half way through. That's just something that applies to life. It doesn't matter what it is you're preparing for, you can't fake it. It's simply impossible to fake your way through and get the same results. When we got home for the evening we grabbed the black light flashlight we bought on Monday and went out to look for scorpions. We searched for about an hour, but I think it's too cold and wet for them right now. We didn't find any, but oh well! I think the spring time will be a little more effective. We had family home evening at Silvercrest, the 65+ singles housing place. That went well but something pretty funny happened afterward. We were talking to some people out in the lobby as we were getting ready to leave. None of these ladies are members, but they've been warming up to us. One of them said I reminded her of her son, I guess I look just like he did when he was about my age.  She asked me where my jacket was. I was in short sleeves because the projected low for the day was 62 degrees. I told her I was wearing it and she said, “I'm going to call your mom and tell her you aren't wearing a jacket. It's freezing out there!” It was pretty funny.  As I was walking out one of the other ladies told Elder Parker to whip me into shape. He came up from behind. I had my helmet on, and he smacked the back of my head. I’ve never seen one of those ladies smile, but she was about ready to die she was laughing so hard. It was so funny to see her reaction!

Thursday was a great day! We had a great time. Elder Parker and I had breakfast at a member’s house since they feed us the first Wednesday of each month. We switched it to Thursday though because transfer meeting was at 9 and we wanted to get there by about 8. Breakfast was really good!  Their son Hunter is hilarious! He's 3, but he's is super funny. I'm pretty sure he has ADHD. He is super talkative and does so many random things! He gets distracted enough that in order to get him to focus on eating his food his dad has to steal a bite of it every time he turns away from it, or he takes the whole plate and hides it. It's pretty funny! They actually know Ben Simmons who was my favorite student teacher in band! He served his mission in Mesa and he was Sister Phelps' favorite missionary. That was a pretty cool thing to know that I'm doing the same thing. Later that day we had to take Elder Anderson with us since his companion, Elder Foulger, had to go to a meeting for mission leadership. We went to the bank so Elder Parker could deposit $1,100 into his mom’s account so she could pay his credit card bill for the t-shirts. He still is about $500 short, so hopefully he gets all of that. We biked over to the bank with $1,100 sitting in Elder Parker's bike bag. On our way there we had a little too much fun on our bikes. Elder Anderson found a set of concrete stairs right outside our apartment. There was a giant puddle down the ramp we usually take because of the rain that morning. We didn't want to go through it, so we just rode down the stairs. That was a fine and good until Elder Parker told Elder Anderson to bike up them now. So, of course, he tried, failed, I tried, failed, he tried, failed, I tried, failed, Elder Parker tried, failed, Elder Anderson tried, and fell off of his bike straight over and onto his side. We decided to quit after that. On our way to the bank we found a concrete circle that was about 15 feet across. We started biking in circles around it and started going faster and faster. I finally gave up right after Elder Parker did, but Elder Anderson kept going, and going, and going, getting faster and faster and kept leaning over further and further. He finally got to a point where his bike slipped right out from underneath him. All this while, Elder Parker had over $1,000 sitting in his bag. It was pretty great! After depositing all of that money, we found another route home. We found this place with a bunch of benches. Elder Parker told me to get my bike up onto the bench, so I said okay. I pulled my front tire up onto the bench and since it was soaked because of the rain it slipped right off and my bike went to the right and my body went to the left. My upper half went into a bush.  It must have looked pretty dang funny! Later Elder Parker was biking down the sidewalk of a pretty narrow street, so a lot of people park their cars up onto the sidewalk a little bit. Elder Anderson was pointing something out so Elder Parker looked back. As he looked forward again he saw the mirror of a car right in line with his handle bars, so he turned to avoid it, but turning his handle bars to the right jammed the left one into the mirror which caused him to go over his handle bars and destroy his palms and thigh, which smacked into the handle bar. All three of us crashed that day, but it was a lot of fun! None of us got seriously hurt, so don't worry! Just a few scrapes and bruises.

Nothing great happened on Friday, We did a lot of knocking and calling without answers. I did start getting an ingrown toe nail last week and it started to hurt a little bit. It's because when I lost my big toenail I clipped it off and there was some that was still in the nail bed that wouldn't come out, so I just left it. I finally started pulling at it because I didn't want to have to go get a surgery.  I pulled it out myself with some pliers. It hurt worse than anything else that I ever have intentionally done to myself, but I'm sure the surgery would be worse. 

Saturday was absolutely packed full of service! 8 or 9 hours of it actually! We started at about 7 that morning with some clean up. There was an old lady’s home whose backyard was absolutely trashed and overgrown.  The front of the house had all of the paint chipping and peeling. All the sisters that were there scraped the old paint off and repainted it.  The elders all went to the back and started trimming a few trees, pulling weeds and tall grass out, and other clean up. It was a great service project and now the house doesn't even resemble what it looked like before, especially in the yard. There was a GIANT bee hive in the back yard. They called a bee keeper to come take care of them. He told us there were between 80,000 and 100,000 bees in the hive, so it was enormous. It was in a big pool filter, so that was pretty intense.

Yesterday, Sunday, was a pretty great day. One of our recent converts who is about 60 blessed the sacrament for the first time! It was really cool to see that. Church was good.  The Christmas devotional was awesome! We watched that on our iPads at the church. It was cool to see so many people in the orchestra and choir that I knew. I noticed Brian Blanchard was playing, so that was really cool! Ben, tell him good job! I loved listening to the music and the speakers. Last night the apartment got a little bit crazy. We said our apartment prayer since that was one of our goals to pray together three times a day right before we leave for the day, lunch, and right before bed. After the prayer Elder Parker threw a bunch of pass along cards in the air and made it rain.  Things started to get crazier and crazier from there. We had some Christmas music playing so we started dancing kind of weird. The dancing got weirder and weirder and more and more wild. Eventually we were going crazy and Elder Parker said that this was a moment that required ice cream. We started off to Basha's, the grocery store across the street. We stopped after a minute and thought, ‘well, it's Sunday, it's 11:00 pm, and we're missionaries’. We decided to go back to the apartment. When we got in we got scared of something and closed the door, locked both dead bolts, and we all ran in and hid. I hid under a box filled with goodies and dumped it over my head and put the box on my head. Elder Foulger hid under a great big box, Elder Anderson hid under the couch cushions. Elder Parker hid under his desk. Eventually Elder Parker took the box off my head and threw Elder Foulgers box. I ran to hide under the couch, but when I got under it, I couldn't breathe, so Elder Parker lifted it off of me. When I got out we just kept lifting until Elder Anderson fell out of the couch. After that we just kept the couch that way. We started to stack chairs and cushions on top of it and created a beautiful tower. Elder Parker and Anderson stayed up until about 1:30 together building a Book of Mormon tower from the floor to the ceiling and then Elder Anderson went to bed. Elder Parker stayed up the rest of the night getting Christmas presents ready for his brother, who lives in Mesa, to pick up so he could take it all to Idaho for Christmas.

That's been my week! I hope all of you had as great of a week as I did! Remember to be awesome this week!

Love,

Elder Mullins

Elders Anderson, Foulger, Mullins, and Parker

My district after the 5K run

Elder Parker's cash!

Couch and Chair Tower

Book of Mormon Tower