215 days left Hop-py Burfday!

so this is coming to the hardest time in my mission where we really have to buckle down and work work work. there is no substitute for it. since the Christmas break is here and all the finals are done we have literally 0 investigators now. they all went to china, back home in Iowa, or Illinois. so we really are having a tough time here. it is going to be sparse but we know that there will be someone here that we will find. there has to be. 

haha so my birthday was a normal regular missionary day filled with tracking and finding people to talk to. nothing really special but a couple of the branch members did ask me when my birthday was cause it was coming up and so leading up to my birth date just really flew by with out any notice of anything. so we were out later than we wanted to be on Friday, but when we came home we found a nice little surprise waiting at our door. it was still warm and we brought in inside and instantly took pictures of it. haha it was pretty funny. did you tell them to put hearts in the writing? or was that them being thoughtful? :) haha but anyway i will include some pic of that. i also had dinner last night with a sister who knew it was my birthday and she is living with an elderly member and she decided to tell her that it was my birthday and so they went and got a cake. nothing big but it was a chocolate cake with candles...i repeat, with candles. i don't remember the last time i had someone else put candles on a cake for me. haha so i blew them out made a wish and then the sister in our branch pulled out a present for me and it turned out to be a twisty turny ball thing that you have a little metal ball that you have to get around a bunch of obstacles . i think it's called perplexes epic. it has 125 things that you have to get around and so far i have gotten to 60. :) haha so it was a really nice birthday. and they did sing to me when they brought out the cake but no pic were taken. haha sorry. but the pizza was awesome and we played basketball with our district the next morning and i brought the pizza and shared with every one. it was pretty cool. :)

well thats about it for me here!!! i love you all and can't wait to hear from you next week! 

love 

Elder Jens Smith

 

What was your birthday week like?  Did some elders sing to you like last time?  Or were you just with your companion?  What did you do on the actual day?  

well the week was ok. i heard that the BYU beat Utah so that was nice. :) haha but other than that nothing really exciting. 

So about the pictures now...

We're wondering about the boofing in the videos...is it something in the car...there is no way...if they came from you... that all those boofs in a row ALL sound the same...And one of the funniest parts was listening to your companion laughing (trying not to) in the background.  we laughed at him. 

 LOL.....ha yeah it is when you want the air to come from inside or outside of the car to heat or cool it down and so when we would switch that it would make that sound and so we decided to put on a fake mooshtash and video it. haha it was pretty entertaining to watch them all afterwards. :)

Good morning video?? who are the savages?   

so it is a recording of our phone on someones iPod and so we played it and we drove past our house going to go to the back way and the savages are the senior couple in our district who has to do apartment checks and so they looked at us as we were playing that and driving by and they all laughed cause they thought the savages saw me freaking out in the car. :) haha pretty funny. 

I loved hearing you talk to the duckies...have there been duckies every where you've been?  I saw Elder Tekanene take a video too...does he see that very often?   

mmm...no i don't think so. just at this place and it was when we were riding our bikes and we saw them just hording over near this bench and so i thought of you and took a video. :)