Of Strings & Green Things: ¡Listos, Siempre Listos!

~Highlight of the Week: getting a package and a letter in the same day! :) ~

I am learning all sorts of useful things here at the CCM, like how to speak Español, and how to survive 18 year old elders, and (by far the most useful thing I have ever learned) how to fold fitted sheets. Yes. After years of wrestling my fitted sheets into an only somewhat recognizable folded state, I now posses the knowledge necessary to perfectly fold a fitted sheet into a nice little compact rectangle. Mexican style. My life is forever changed.

Hermana Gleed and I ran three laps around the grassy part of the track barefoot the other day. We decided our noses wouldn´t be able to survive our shoes getting another soaking (the smell of our closets could knock out a small elephant by the time p-day comes around), but we couldn´t give up our run (exercise time is precious). It was quite the work out, because the warm weather grass that they have here is rather thick, and we were sinking in a good 2 or 3 inches with every step. Gotta love the rain :)

at the track

Elder Bednar is fantastic. May we all get the opportunity to listen to him this upcoming General Conference! We watched a clip of him in class the other day, and he was talking about spiritual promptings. He made the point that we don´t have to recognize promptings as spiritual promptings when we receive them, and that often times we won´t even know we were prompted until much later. So what´s most important is to live worthy of the spirit and stop worrying so much about recognizing them in the moment. Good stuff. Gotta love the apostles. And for a quick side note, our district is pro at saying ´Apóstoles´. We´ve got it down :)

taking devotional seriously

a dark, solid colored umbrella :)

Something my companion said got My Fair Lady stuck in my head earlier this week. And not just any song from My Fair Lady. It was the ´aw ah want is a room sauhm where, fah awaee from the cauw nahght aeer´ one. K. That probably means nothing to anyone. But it´s where Aubry Hepburn is singing in this thick Cockney accent, and it´s fabulous. Unfortunately Cockney accents don´t lend themselves readily to Español. And they sound a little out of place in Mexico. But so does the Mary Poppins ´It´s a jolly holiday with Maryeeeee´ song, and Hermana Gleed sings that every time we whip out the paraguas (umbrellas :) We´re just connecting with our English roots I guess.

Here´s something noteworthy - I drew a fantastic t-rex during a game of Save/Kill the Flower this past Tuesday. I´ve never drawn a more perfect dinosaur.

And I´ve been humbled by a few embarrassing moments this past week:

We were in Tall. I feel pretty comfortable in the Tall labs, since we´ve been here for 5 weeks now, but I´ve never ventured to play music through LDS.org like some of the other missionaries do. But I was feeling bold. So I went for it. I put on my big clunky headphones, and pulled up a hymn. It sounded a little faded, so I´m turning up the volume when Hermana Gleed taps me urgently on the shoulder and says, ´Hermana! You´re headphones! They´re not plugged in!´ I immediately realized the whole lab could hear the hymn, panicked, cut the sound, and could have melted in my seat right then and there :)

Then yesterday I told my teacher,´Necesito un baño´, which does not mean, ´I need to use the bathroom,´ but instead, ´I need a shower´. And then later that day I told him, ´Yo soy enfermo,´ which happens to mean, ´I´m mentally ill´ instead of ´I´m sick´. I´m on a role this week with Español :) But my roommates informed me this morning that I was talking in my sleep last night, in Spanish! So all is not lost, and perhaps there is hope for me after all :)

So I´m sending a picture of the funny sinks. And of me getting a package, and of my baby palm tree (Jorge), and a tree we´ve deemed the Horton Tree (it looks exactly like the tree in that one Dr. Seuss book where the elephant sits on an egg in a nest in a tree . . . ), and of us at the track (when it´s not raining) and of my shoes, and of guava! I think it´s guayaba in Español. . . I was so happy when they had it at the Comedor the other day. It´s my current favorite fruit.