Hello Houston!

Hello Houston! Glad to hear from you again, glad most of you had a good week. Erin I hope you get better soon, but since you basically wished you were home sick every day before I left you better take advantage of the days you're home from school. I'm super jealous yall went to the temple this week, you're right Mom, I can't go I'm not in Toronto but we've been talking about about temples in the past few days and I really wish I could. The ward is planning a temple trip for February and I wish I could tag along, but I guess I'll stay here and work....

Can you believe I'm finished with my first transfer? Sister Tuisku and I are staying in Owen Sound, which we knew would happen, and I'm super relieved because I do not want to start over again yet! Still, I'm getting pretty stinking old, if time could please slow down just a bit I'd be grateful.

So, since I'm going to be here at least 6 more weeks, let me give you a little taste of where I'm living. First of all, Canadian squirrels are terrifying! They're black and when the stand up they're probably knee high, I'm pretty sure they eat birds and rodents, not nuts. Every time I see one I freak out a little bit. Secondly, I learned about something called tent caterpillars, they're super common here in the summer. Look them up, one of the ward members was telling us how they spin these nests and breed like thousands at a time, the nest can engulf the entire tree and it almost always kills the tree. They have to light them on fire! I hope I'm here when it's warm enough to see them. Also, my weekly correlation meeting with the ward mission leader is fantastic. Each week he writes on one side of the board everything we need to talk about, and on the other side the hockey scores from Canada, Finland, and the US that week, it's hilarious! I guess some big tournament was going on, so he wanted to let us know who got the gold. You know you're in Canada when.....

This week was good, per usual! Sadly I didn't quite finish the Book of Mormon in a week, I slept through the alarm to wake up and read for an hour yesterday and Sister Tuisku didn't realize I was sleeping in on purpose. So when I finished this morning it took me exactly an hour to finish, I'm still kicking myself that I came so close! But I finished this morning, and technically when we first set the goal the plan was to read from p-day to p-day so I technically did it. I'm going to try again sometime though, but not until I've had a chance to catch up on my sleep. But it paid off, we found a new investigator this week! We tracted into him on Thursday, his name is Dustin and he was super interested when we said we taught people about God, he wanted us to teach him right then. We had an appointment though, so we met him the next day and talked some about the plan of salvation. He really liked that we teach about missionary work after we die and we didn't think he was going to hell because he wasn't Christian. Saturday we took him on a tour of the church and invited him to come Sunday, it was awesome BUT THEN he slept through it! Super disappointing, but we're seeing him tomorrow. The only thing is that he's moving to Vancouver on the 16th so we can't teach him very long, we're basically just preparing him so we can pass him off to the missionaries there. Steve did come to church this week, so he officially has a baptismal date! We're super pumped, he's awesome. Chris went to Toronto this weekend so he didn't come, but we're praying all 3 are at church this weekend. Lynda is really sick so we still haven't gotten to see her unfortunately. We also have 2 kids of less active members who are old enough to be baptized that we're hoping to be able to begin teaching this week, which is great, they've been trying to get missionaries teaching them for a long time!

I have a request for you, Dad you'll probably enjoy this the most: can you send me family history stories? I have my pedigree chart and know random names I'm related to but I know very few genealogy stories. Especially if you could send me some good pioneer stories, that would be awesome!

I hope you have another good week, love you all! Grandma is always in my prayers, I hope that continues to go okay. Talk to ya in a week!

P.S. I got my first missionary lotto ticket from the Stewarts! Tell them thank you so much, sadly I haven't scratched it off yet because Sister Tuisku hasn't been convinced yet it isn't breaking the rules to scratch it off. I'll let you know next week if I won anything!