Pizza Pizza!

Letter to Dad

 Hello!!!

So first off big news for this week. Today we are receiving an Elder from the Ukraine mission :) After a year they have to renew their visas and while they do that they have to stay in a new country, so we're hosting one of them for three days :) That should be fun.

So as far as pizza goes. It is actually 300 times better here. I'm not quite sure exactly what they do, but they have this one place called Tashir and it makes amazing pizza. The crust is pretty thick and they mix mayonnaise into the tomato sauce. The cheese here is about as awful as the milk (pretty awful) but for some reason when they put it on pizzas it actually tastes pretty good. They have quite a few weird toppings but they do also have some really good ones. They have this one three meat pizza that I really enjoy, and they have a couple other interesting ones.  Plus they also sell crusts at even the smallest grocery stores here, so we often make our own too :)

So as far as the email rule goes, it was just instruction President Carter got from the Area Presidency. President Carter included it in Zone Conference. He made an analogy about a table with shaky legs. He said if these legs are shaky and you have something fragile you want to put somewhere, are you going to put it on this table? No, so what do we do to fix it? We don't have to absolutely destroy the table, we just have to tighten the legs a little bit. So with the mission, Heavenly Father is giving us people to teach, but he won't put it on shaky foundations, so he wants us to tighten up the rules a bit so we have a solid foundation for them.
....I'm still getting used to it, but it will be fine I guess. Snail mail still takes quite a bit to get to and from here, so that won't be to fun.  For instance, I still haven't gotten the packages, but they should be coming soon :)

As far as health though, I'm doing fine :) Just about over my sickness.

So Elder Peterson is from Clinton Utah. (His brother was actually interviewed for his eagle badge by Uncle Neil :) ) He hasn't gone to college yet but he's thinking about going to Weber State. Some day he's thinking about maybe being a professional baker (of cakes and treats and stuff). But yeah, I don't know a whole lot about his family but he has four brothers and two sisters. Both of his sisters are married and one of his brothers in law actually works for Marvel Comics as an illustrator. He actually worked for a few years in Santa Monica :) But yeah, as far as sports goes, I think he played soccer while he was in school :) So yeah, that's my companion.

I'll try to do better on pictures. It's a little difficult because I don't have too much time to take pictures and we're not supposed to while we're proselyting, but I'll see what I can do :) I actually had a few for this week but the computer doesn't accept pictures. We might find one in a bit that does, so stay posted :)  (He did send pictures!)

Funny you should mention rock throwing youth :p We were actually walking by a few when they started throwing rocks at us, so we took off and tried getting away. One of the youth ran after us and caught up with us and starting talking, pretending to be interesting. Then he took Elder Peterson's tag and walked off, saying "thanks for the gift" I was a little bit more frustrated than I should have been, so I said "hey, don't take that. You're stealing" He then said "No I'm not, you gave it as a gift" and I said "No we didn't, that is a lie. And now you've broken two of the commandments" (oops.) He walked off and we decided to just let it go, but one of his friends got mad at him and brought the tag back for us. I kinda felt bad afterwards, so I decided to take more control of myself after that :p

And for service we actually went and chopped wood for our member Samvel again. It was funny, Elder Peterson was having a bit of difficulty with one of the logs so Samvel tried coaching him. He said "Strike the axe on the wood. Don't place the axe on the wood, strike it! Pretend it's a Lamanite!" :p We love Samvel and his clever remarks.

Anyways, that was my week :) Love you all!

Elder Hammer

Ps. As far as packages go, the mission just wants us to send them though normal mail because if we don't we have to do some customs thing. Just for any future references :)

Two quick notes from my letter:

...Soooooo Violet. It was a rough week. She'll called us and told us she'd be going into the hospital today. She passed her interview and was going to be baptized tomorrow, but....yeah. So we'll see how that turns out. She'll be in for 10 days, so we're not quite sure when she'll be coming out. :/

...So is it warming up? Well we thought it was. Then we walked out the door this morning and saw a blizzard. So we walked back in, put more layers on, then went out to do internet. :p

Jared included these pictures.  He said some were from a branch activity. I personally like the first picture...and the lumberjack picture..and the orange tie picture.  Okay, I like most pictures with Jared in them!!!