Whew!! What a crazy week!! We have
been SUPER busy!! We were doing the parking at the temple for the last time
Monday, so we moved our preparation day to Tuesday, which for us was shopping
and a much-needed nap. :P
Christmas eve we went caroling with
our district, which was way fun. Not gonna lie, we sounded pretty good for a
group of 19-21 year olds ! haha It was a blast though just bringing some
Christmas cheer around.
Christmas morning we went to Bishop Leonard's
home where they had a wonderful breakfast for us and let us skype home which
was awesome as usual. Elder Riggs and I were a little fried after when we
realized that the next time we see our family won't be over skype, but hey,
life goes on :)
After breakfast we went to a
retirement community and played pokeno and sang Christmas carols! I really miss
doing that more frequently with TNT, so I really loved doing that again. It was
amazing.
Then, in the evening, we threw a Christmas
party!!! There was a group of missionaries who didn't have anywhere to go on
Christmas, so we (with permission) threw a party for all of them!! We watched
the Emperor’s new groove and had a white elephant gift exchange. It was super
fun!! Elder Riggs and I realized we kind of miss throwing parties! They're a
total blast! I forgot all about that!! haha
The rest of the week, we've just
been working super hard!! We've been talking a lot about establishing the
mission culture that we want in the mission, and one culture we want to improve
on is a culture of talking to everyone. So, that starts with us! Elder Riggs
and I are trying to be the trend setters and, well, we haven't found any young
single adults thus far, but we're becoming known for dishing out referrals like
crazy!! Just putting forth that little bit of extra effort is so rewarding! You
get to meet so many amazing people out here and too often we just let them walk
by!
The people here in Virginia are just
amazing as always. It's such a transient area, and there are people from
EVERYWHERE!!! Most of the people we have the privilege of teaching are
immigrants from around the world, and it's always just incredible to get to
know other cultures and nationalities. I love it!
We took the new "official picture"...Elder Riggs and I are loving working together again!
So, one more funny story, then I'll
sign out, but I have to share, especially for all the computer nerds in the
family...
So, last night, we suddenly start
getting all these phone calls from EVERYONE in the mission saying "We want
to drive the truck!!" It didn't take long to smell a prank. Someone had
sent out a text to the WHOLE mission saying the first person to call me would
get to drive our truck for a week. So, I went into sleuthing mode. We use an
assistant's gmail account to send out mission texts, so I first went to the
outbox there. Nothing... So I went to the trash box and there it is!! Sent to
everyone in the mission except Elder Riggs and I, and President Riggs. So I
investigate further. By opening up the message properties, I managed to pull
from the programming in the email the IP address for the computer that sent the
email. After plugging in the IP address to an IP lookup I got the coordinates
of that computer! The source? Salt Lake City, Utah!! right then is when
President walked in, so we grabbed him and had him make a phone call. We called
the Cluff home. And what did we find? Elder Yates, Elder Litchfield and Elder
Cluff (3 of President's old assistants) hanging out at the Cluffs!! We totally
busted them!! Within 30 minutes of them sending the email, we had President on
the phone with them harassing them!! It was so great!
So, that's my funny story for the
week. You can run, but you can't hide. When asked how he knew it was them,
President responded: "Guys. I'm the President!.... Oh, and we have Elder
Hodgson working on it and he hacked in
and found this all out and now we have the latitude and longitude of your
computer." Gotta love it!!
Love you all!!
-Elder Hodgson
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