"My daughter is not home. I do not know anything."

Quote of the week explanation

This one is pretty simple. Some guy told us he didn't know anything when we knocked on his door. Anything.

Ahoy!

Forgive me if there is a sense of dread being conveyed in this letter. A pounding, voluminous aura of fear mingled with a hopeless longing, a clinging desperation for things to remain as they once were. One experiences such symptoms—such emotional chaos—when the temperature is supposed to spike into the high nineties this afternoon. I came into the bay area expecting a mild, temperate climate, and now I'm forcefully being shoved into a blast furnace. The searing power of the sun shall be made known unto men this day…I guess it's not quite as bad as all of that. Several native Bay-area-ers have affirmed to us that it should return to a more moderate temperature soon, and that it is virtually unheard of to have long, drawn out periods of this hellish heat. At least we're not into the triple digits.

OK, I'll get off my soap box now. (Steps down from a small green box). The temperature is only truly unbearable if you are wearing suits, but luckily we are only required to don those for meetings and other special occasions. 

After that unnecessarily long introduction, I suppose I will humor you and move on with the letter.

The work continues to press forward down in Hayward. We didn't technically add any new people this week, but we do have some super solid individuals whom we are going to try and start teaching this week. One of them lives in Newark, which is out of our mission, but the beauty of being in the Mandarin program is that we have the ability to leave the mission as long as we obtain permission from our Mission President. So we went out to contact this lady and her husband who a member had referred to us. Our member had said that they own a Chinese porcelain store, and that they are there all day, so we went to the shop to talk to them. They are super nice, and are some of the people who we will try to teach this coming week. But their shop... wow. I have never seen so much expensive glass art. I was afraid to breathe for fear of knocking something over. Some of the pieces had little certificates of authenticity to show how, well... authentic they are. Needless to say, I felt quite poor walking in there. Even the price for a small metal statue of a frog was over $200. I did realize how much I love Chinese art from going in there, even though you have to be the CEO of some vast energy conglomerate to afford any.

At this point in time, the reader may be asking: "What else could've possibly happened in such an obviously eventful week?" To such a reader I say that I really have only said one thing that occurred, and therefore could still continue to write about the goings on of this week. I now will proceed to do so.

We stopped by yesterday to follow up with somebody who we had invited to go to the temple open house, and then we had actually seen her there the next day. So, we stopped by just to see how it went, and...when she answered the door, she looked at us for a second, and then said: "don't go away", before slamming the door. So, we wait. And wait. And twiddle our thumbs. And just as I was beginning to think that she had gone from talking to us at the door to running out of her back door, jumping the fence, and catching a bus to Timbuktu (Yes, I know you can't take a bus there from here, calm down), she comes back out. And we have a forty minute long conversation with her about the temple, and our church in general. It was pretty great. And after we had our conversation, she told us that we could come by anytime and said that she would be expecting us to stop by on a Friday sometime because she works all the other days. (Pauses to catch breath). So, we'll see what happens with that.

This coming week we will have a mission tour. What that is is basically when a general authority, usually a 70, comes and tours the mission, and also is the main event of a zone conference. The mission is being toured by Elder Jörg Klebingat. He once gave a talk in general conference titled "Standing Before the Throne of God with Confidence". We were talking to Sister Durham this week, and perhaps she put it best: "He's German, so..." (pounds fist into open palm). It should be fun.

On that note, we did have interviews this week. It was pretty good. President Durham's the GOAT, so it's always pretty fun.

Well, that's pretty much everything that you would care about. Truth be told, many of you most likely didn't care about any of it, but whatever.

-Beeg (GR)

P.S. The beginning of the Book of Exodus is pretty epic.

P.P.S. People who are cooking really don't have time for us. They often act like the fate of humanity itself is at stake if they are distracted for even one moment of their process.

P.P.P.S. I hear the Warriors are losing.