we got exceptional on our room being clean!

We had TRC for the first time last week. It is basically like home teaching in Russian. It went great and one of the people we taught is waiting for his mission call so maybe he will go to Russia. It is nice for people to understand more when we attempt to teach Russian to someone. We try to come up with things every day that we can do to be funny and fun. We tend to have a thing every day and I won't remember to tell the big thing for every day but i will mention a few. One thing that we have done is we all are whistling and we are sychronized about putting our Sunday clothes on and off (don't ask). Eating has been okay. I go through the whole cafeteria to make my meal. I would think they would do different combinations of things but it is like a sandwich every meal. I go to the leftovers almost every time which is surprising. I normally get meat from the leftovers, sometimes rice, yogurt from the salad area, a dessert from somewhere else, milk, and a couple other things all in different places.

I have been playing some really good volleyball. Sometimes i just want to play Ultimate but i don't think they are opening the field up till end of April, almost May. I don't even know why they decide they need to wait so long. It isn't fun being at the MTC with good weather when you can't do anything. Leave in the winter (if you can choose) that way you can get your first winter over with first. We moved to our assigned classroom finally and it is 90-100 degrees in there literally. Thank goodness we can take off our suit coats in the classroom but it is so hot around the MTC and they haven't given us permission to take them off for summer rules yet, just like the field which is ridiculous. Sometimes i wonder if they have tried wearing a suit in a 95 degree classroom where the air doesn't work and then going around the MTC in it. This place is crazy but it is nice to be away. I can't wait till i get to cook some real food :D

Another thing that happened as our crazy thing for the day was opening a door. A bunch of elders locked themselves out of their room and the night before we learned how to open a door without a key. We use an envelope to get floss through the top seal of a door then you slide the floss to the ground and use a hangar to pull it to the outside of the door. After that, you tie a vacuum cord to the floss and pull it all the way to the inside, top of the door and slowly lower it on the knob then hold one side of the cord with your foot while pulling the other side of the cord and jiggling the knob till it opens.

Easter was great. Everyone was expecting a general authority. We had been doing companion exchanges for choir but it turns out that you had to participate in the choir a week in advance for Easter so I didn't get in. It turns out we didn't have a general authority but the speaker was great. I helped pass the sacrament for 3000+ missionaries because some other elders were in the choir and I had to help do it for them. Later we had a testimony meeting and it turned into "I am grateful for" and advice to the point where a branch presidency counselor had to stand up and tell them to bear simple testimonies of Christ so more people could bear their testimonies. We had huge lines on both sides of the pulpit of missionaries leaving so i was going to bear mine but every time i wanted to stand up, five more missionaries would get in line so i didn't. Our temple walks seem to let everyone have a break from the MTC but they are super hot because of our suits. It is nice to see the temple but i really like looking at the fountains. Easter Sunday night we had Sheri Dew come and speak. I think that is an author of a book mom has? She gave a really great talk about not going with the flow of the world and shared experiences of how it can be hard. She also talked about being on a divine errand and it taking elect to find elect from God.

One funny thing that happened was during volleyball one day. I was playing and we are super careful to not have contact between elders and sisters. I am especially careful because i don't like to hurt people, it is a big deal at the MTC (which makes sense) and so i avoid anything crazy happening, and i play noncontact sports so it is natural. Any time a sister goes for the ball, i back off. An elder was going for the ball at the same time as a sister was and i was the third person on the court. He jumped up and hit her hard to the ground. It looked like she was going to hit her head super hard on the ground. I caught her right before she hit the ground and then i quickly thought about it and didn't know what to do so i just set her on the ground and went back to my volleyball position. The sisters in our district later found out and thought it was so funny because they could totally see me doing that. The sister had broke a blood vessel earlier in the game so it was probably good that she didn't get injured again. She could have broke her nose (pun) or a concussion, etc.

Elder Nelson in our room got super sick. He threw up about 9 times within a day. He wouldn't eat during dinner one day then he quickly left so i quickly said companion exchange and followed him to the bathroom sure that he would throw up. We all had to take turns babysitting him the next day. I cleaned and disinfected the whole room during my time. The elders were glad and especially because right after i left, we had a random clean check and we got a perfect score. The only thing we hadn't done was vacuum because he was sleeping but we had the vacuum in the room and they asked another elder about it when they came in and he said we were just waiting for him to wake up so they gave us an exceptional room. Well that's about all i have for now.