what's new

On Friday we got a new schedule, so I'm sad to say that we no longer proselyte before breakfast. It's weird, but I actually think I'm going to miss it. It's kind of like a habit of diving into a freezing swimming pool full of rude people every morning. But I actually genuinely liked it a lot of the time. Now we get ready and study language first thing in the morning, and our other studies are right before dinner. It means we spend a lot more daylight outside. Although the mornings and nights have had a little more light, which is giving me confidence that spring really will come.

It's a warm winter with way too much snow, and it went above freezing this week and turned the ground into a treacherous labyrinth of ice, slush, and puddles. Not only that, but a while back my companion pulled a muscle in her leg, which means we walked around preeetty slowly for a little bit there. But it's okay.

I left my planner at a member's house and haven't gotten it back yet, so don't remember what we did before friday. That's normal, it probably wasn't important.

We talked about idioms at our poorly-attended English club this week, which was fairly hilarious, and I realized that when I speak english I can't get two sentences without an idiom cropping up. I mean, without using an idiom. But we had to try to find a list of idioms without using the internet, so we put ourselves on patrol in our speech for idioms and now we can't kick the habit. So every time Sister Palmer or I use(s) a new idiom we're like "WAIT, 'break it to her', why didn't we use THAT".

We looked at an apartment we might move to and bought zippy night-gown things. Russian women all wear these things around their house or to clean or whatever, and we decided to embrace the culture. Actually managed to teach some new investigators this week, and ended up taking a partial hike up a mountain before a lesson, complete with commentary like  "these garages were all built up here after the war, except for that, which was built in 1943. And that building was built in 1957, and that one in 1959, and all of these apartments were built in '72 except for this one..."

I can't think what else to write. Life is busy and also not. Don't let the grumpy people surrounding you get you down. Set goals and do the things you said you'd do. Talk to people about repentance. That's what I'm trying to do, anyway. Love you all.

Sister Nielsen

Rosa's note to me (Anna): "I'll let you be the judge of whether this picture of us in our oriental robes (that is the FIRST dictionary definition of халат) is appropriate for the blog. you can see our knees." I assume these are the zippy nightgown things. I think you all can survive the horror of knees