"Cowabunga!" as Brother Walty, one of the high priests in the Boardman ward would say. Transfers have come! I'm currently writing to you from the Umatilla library. Between Boardman and Hermiston. Its a beautiful sunny P day with my New Companero Elder Richards. It’s been a pretty good week! Lets Flash back: The beginning of the week was spent saying goodbye to the Members and some investigators in Grandview, then Wednesday Morning we headed to the transfer site up at the Yakima Stake Center. From there we waited, and watched Glenn Beck's conversion story to pass the time waiting for the transfer car to get there. Side note, Glenn Beck is a crazy cracker. Haha. From there we rode down to the stake center by the Colombia River down in Tricities. From there our transfer group split up, everyone was staying in tri cities except for me. Elder Vance one of our Senior Missionaries came and picked me up and we made the trek down to Hermiston OR. I remember crossing the Columbia River, the natural border between Washington and Oregon and thinking "Wow this is it, the beginning of the Next chapter of my mission. For the past 4 months I'd been in the Yakima valley with occasional trips to Kennewick, but now I was breaking new ground. Fun fact, we passed the world’s largest Irrigated farm on the way. Apparently its owned by the church. Elder Vance told me a little bit about it. Well we arrived in Hermiston, and from there I met my New Companion Elder Richards. Elder Richards is a good guy, he is from Houston TX, he's an old man, (He has about 4 months left in his mission.) and he trained Elder Swenson, was companions with Elder Bao and they got along very well, and to top it off, My first night in the mission home he's the one that took me out to get a teaching experience. So I'd heard a lot about him haha. He's a really good missionary and I can tell we're going to have a fun transfer.

As for the Boardman area, it’s a small little farming town. The people in the ward are really nice, and we get tons of service opportunities working on peoples farms. There's a family of 3 who are on date to be baptized on the 21st of this month, so that'll be exciting! So we've been having fun. Saturday morning, the Walty's invited us over to have breakfast at the Senior Center, (all you can eat breakfast buffet for only 4.50 CHA CHING$) and after to come over to their house and trim the dead branches from their willow tree. So that was a lot of fun. There a really good couple and we enjoyed helping them out.
The ward is really fun. Sunday morning we had ward council at 8 in the morning, and they have a really good ward mission leader. I was really impressed because they seemed to be men of action. It wasn't just like "Okay we need to activate so and so's sons" It was that and then, "Okay how are we going to do it" and they all brain stormed and it was beautiful. The ward is a great help with missionary work, they're really good at giving referrals and fellowshipping, I feel like this will be a great place to serve. After Ward council we had Choir Practice, and it was pretty funny because we were the only men there. The choir director is from the Philippines and she just had a list of obscure songs I'd never heard before to have us sing, and we'd go through it with some difficulty trying to sing the Men’s part without any practice and after each song, she would turn to us and say "Elders, you're sounding kind of weak, you need to be better"
I'm convinced she's going to make me tougher by the end of my time here, hahaha. Well that’s about it for the week, love ya bunches, take care!