Week 84 - Happy Easter!
Oh boy… I may have skipped a few weeks. Because of that, I have a lot to recap. So, sit back, relax, and enjoy the show!
Breaking the Sandwich Record
One of our service opportunities here is helping at a soup kitchen! One of the main things we do there is make sandwiches. Elder Butler was obsessed with breaking the record for most sandwiches made in a single shift. Tuesday March 12th was his last chance to do so, as transfers were that weekend. So, we got to work. After 3 hours of non-stop max speed sandwich making, we did it. The previous record was somewhere in the 400-500 range. We made 740. I don’t think that record will be beaten any time soon, and I don’t care to try to beat it again so for the rest of the time I’m in Saskatoon I’ll be making sandwiches at a normal pace. The next missionaries can try to beat it when I’m gone.
The End of the Prank War
The prank war has ended, and the Sisters kinda won. BUT, not without help. In fact, they got the entire district to conspire against us! There were a couple more little pranks back and forth, like filling cars with balloons, but nothing super interesting until the day we had District Council. As I’ve previously described, we occasionally back our car really close to the other missionaries when they park on the street. Well, when Elder Butler and I arrived at the church for District Council, everyone else had gotten there before us, and were all parked back to back to back. Naturally, we parked right in front of them. Little did we know, they had parked that way very intentionally to manipulate us. We fell right into their trap. They had previously arranged for a local member to put fake tickets on our windows while we were in District Council. After we finished District Council, everyone in the district played along just to convince me and Elder Butler that the tickets were real. Looking back, they were pretty obviously fake. They didn’t have a ticket number and they were printed on regular printer paper. But everyone played their part so well that we didn’t question it. Plus, we never would have expected the entire district to conspire against us. So, the Sisters kinda won. But they needed the help of the entire district to do so. So, did they win? Regardless, Elder Butler and I did one last thing to get them back. We were all out of good physical prank ideas, so we switched our tactics to mental game instead. Wednesday, we told them we had a couple more ideas, and then Thursday we just acted as suspicious as possible to make them think we had something to outdo them. It was pretty funny we had them super stressed for a couple days. All for us to not actually do anything 😂
Transfers
Then we had transfers! Something interesting about being in Saskatoon during transfers is I didn’t have an assigned companion for a couple days. The transfer bus starts in Saskatoon, stays a night in Regina, drives to Winnipeg and back to Regina to stay another night there, before finally making it back to Saskatoon. So, I had to wait 2 nights before my new companion arrived. While I waited, I worked in a trio with Elder McKenzie and Elder Harrold. It was super fun! We played a couple good games of Magic as well. Both of which I won 😜.
My new companion now is Elder Felix! He's pretty cool! He has a pickleball net which is pretty fun. We had a tournament one p day, and he whooped us all 😂.
Oh, also I guess I should probably let y'all know I'm a District Leader now. Kinda cool I guess? Not a big deal though. It's just my job to pretend I know what I'm doing and help other missionaries in my district figure out what they should be doing. Does anyone actually know what we're doing? Kinda. But most of the time as long as we're trying our best God does 90% of the work and we're just along for the ride.
More Thoughts on Car Boots
The funniest thing to come from that trio was a conversation we had about car boots. Did you know you can buy a car boot on Amazon for 50 bucks? Think about how much power one person wields with a car boot. You could automatically become the ringleader of your friend group because if any of them go against you, you can just boot their car. What are they gonna do about it? Or what if you don't want to go to work one day? Just boot your boss’ car (and don't get caught of course). Or here's a creative one: boot your own car, and claim it wasn't you and must have been some troublemaker teenager in your neighborhood. “Sorry boss, can't come to work, my car got booted by some knucklehead.” If your fast enough with the boot, you could really do someone dirty at a red light. Someone cut you off in traffic? Goodluck getting wherever you're going with that boot on your car.
Disclaimer: don't actually do any of these, I do not encourage any of these, they are just fun to think about. Except maybe booting yourself to get out of work. That one's kinda funny.
Murphy's Law
If you haven't heard of Murphy's Law, it's an adage that states “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong” (not to be confused with Muphry's Law which states “when writing or editing some kind of text, there will always be spelling errors”)
Well, we recently made a music video for Easter and let me tell you, everything went wrong. It would take a minute to type out all of it so I'm gonna record a voice memo instead.
I also made a post on Facebook talking about some of the Easter related Gospel connections I drew from that story so feel free to go check that out here:
Easter!!
Easter day was awesome! Lots of our friends made it to church and we had some delicious food at Sister Prentice's house! And today, we had a district potluck and decorated eggs! We had lots of fun. I unfortunately forgot to get pictures for most of it, but here are a few of my favorite eggs:
That's all for now. It's a great day to be a missionary!
-Elder Hays