Feb 11-2013

Dear Mom,

so training so far is going really really well. well... kinda. my new companions name is elder pettitt. it looks like petite, and he is pretty petite, but its pronounced ( pet-it) like what do you do with a cat? you pet it. or you take it out to the middle of now where and leave it.;) oh and before i forget, yes i have gotten the package. i also got someting else that was really neat. it was a pillow case from people back at home. it didnt have a letter on it so i was a little confused, but it was really thoughtful and nice of everyone to to that for me. i put it on my pillow once i got it. oh back to the reason i said, well... kinda. so we have a great companionship together. it even reminds me of my compaionship with elder stauffer. which if you remember me telling you, was great and probably one of my very best companions. infact, i would say that he is my favorite companion that is still in the mission. my follow up trainer though, had a profound effect on me. anyway, the reason behind (well...kinda) is i feel like we are suffering the results of significant disobedience. since my last companionship went so sour, elder petitt and i are kinda rebuilding our area and we just had probably one of the worst weeks i have ever had in my whole mission numbers wise. we are working hard, but nothing seems to be working really well for us. that being said, we are working very hard, we are very unified, we have a good number of appointments ahead of us, and we have been striving to continue to make diligence and obedience and faith more of a part of our companionship than ever before. so, what good luck, what bad luck hahaha. its like the opposite of last transfer hahaha. i know things will get better though. because it was very similar when i was with elder stauffer. we stuggled at first, but i had the most successfull time with him by the end of out companionship. so, the way i see it, we can only go up.

story time.
so this week has been an adventure for my bike. so, i got the bike tires you sent me and i was working on switching them one day. so i took off the old tires no problem. but as i was putting on the new tire, i found that somewhere inbetween the time of taking off the old tire and putting on the new tire, my tube acquired a hole in it. so, i waited untill the next preperation day to buy a new tire. so, i bought the new tire from walmart and when i tried to pump it up, i found that it had a different kind of valve than a regular bike tube so i either needed to get an attachment for the new tire or a whole new tube to replace it with a correct valve. so we called up a near by bike shop and found out that they had all the stuff i needed. they had the right kind of tube and even the attachment. so i ended up going to the bike shop and bought a new tube with plans to return the walmart weird tube. and i also bought the attachment for future use if i needed it. so we got back to the appartment and started to put on the new tire and tube with the normal valve. and once i got everything on, and started to pump up the tire, i heard a hissing sound and found out that i must have done something wrong while putting on the tire. luckily i had the weird tire from walmart and the attachment to go with it. so this time i carefully put on the new tire with my last tube. i pumped it al up and no holes. thank goodness. so, now for the back tire. nothing went wrong and i was relieved that it pumped up and everything with no holes or difficulty. so, the next day we started biking outside and it was actually a little cold outside. and since it was cold outside, and i pumped my tires up inside where it was warm, it seemed like my tires needed to be pumped up a little bit. so we got out the bike pump, bought it outside down the 3 flights of stairs to our appartment, and pumped up my tires outside. and everything worked great. so, we worked hard that day and when it started getting dark, elder pettitt and i went home for some dinner and to plan. and as we were doing so inside the appartment and while we were talking, we were both startled by a loud pop sound following a long hiss. we were both confused by the sound and then realized, it was one of my bike tires. because i pumped up the air outside in the cold and brought it into the warm house, the air inside the tire expanded and my tire exploded by the valve. of course. so we quickly released alot of the air out of the other tire that was still intacted and saved it. so long story short, i went through 3 bike tubes in 2 days. and all that without trying. so today we will be going to get me yet another bike tube. if anything else, i am learning the hard way about bikes. i thought you might get a kick out of that.

i hope you like this lettter. and thanks so much for your encouraging comments. i love you so much and you lift me up and make my day every time. hope to hear from you next monday.

-LOVE ELDER MASULONIS