Month: July 2024

1. Buy Starburst
2. Put Starburst in car
3. Bake gently at 115 degrees
4. Eat warm, soft Starburst!

I don’t know why, but when I stumbled across this photo I couldn’t stop laughing. I’ll just leave it here.

It truly is amazing how hot it is here in El Centro. We step outside and it feels like when you’re baking cookies and open the oven door, and feel a blast of heat hit your face. Except here, that blast of heat just… keeps coming. You walk around in it.

Speaking of cookies, one of the young missionaries we’re serving with mentioned the other day that he was thinking of frying an egg on the sidewalk. I asked what he thought of baking cookies in his car. He thought it was a great idea, and this morning I whipped up a batch of chocolate-chip cookie dough. I gave a little baggie of dough to each of the ten missionaries in our area, including him. Most of them just ate the dough (no judgement– that’s perfectly legitimate). But Elder Bushman brought out a baking pan, set little cookie dough balls on it, and let it sit.

Here’s the video he made (actually three videos in sequence):

Although they’re not quite like you’d get in the oven, I thought it was hilarious that they actually baked. That’s hot.

Everyone you meet is just a friend you haven’t seen in a while.

— Jenna Merrill

After several months of living in Montana, Kyra and Greta have decided to embrace the “Western lifestyle”. That means they bought some cowboy hats, which they wear around town. Last night at the Bigfork Rodeo, I’m sure they fit right in with the crowd.

I love it! They’re both so beautiful and fun.

I was scrolling Reddit just now, looking for some nice nature photos to use as computer desktop backgrounds. I stumbled across this amazing shot of Peyto Lake in Alberta:

Literally a dozen photos later, I saw this shot, by a different photographer:

The contrast between the two startled me. I’m sure that standing in this spot, looking out over the wilderness, is breathtaking. The latter photo above looks amazing. But compared with the former, it seems dull and drab.

Sometimes I feel like my photography– despite years of effort– is like the second photo. I remember being in places and feeling awestruck by them, but my pictures don’t always reflect it. I enjoy doing post-processing work, although I feel like I need to stay true to the actual scene. For example, the first photo here seems over-processed, and I don’t want to take it that far. I guess I just need to find the right balance.

Luckily photography can be a lifelong pursuit, and I still have a lot of life in me. One of these days…

Missionary life is divided into chunks of time called “transfers” which last six weeks each. At the end of a transfer, many of the missionaries serving in an area are shuffled around and reassigned to new areas and new companions. In the past, I’d hear missionaries talk about upcoming transfer days and how nervous they were about what would happen. Will I stay in this area for another six weeks? If not, where will I go? Who will I be with? There’s often speculation and good-natured joking.

Only now, when I’m serving a mission, do I really appreciate the anxiety of transfers. Of course Pepper and I aren’t going anywhere– we’ll serve in the same area for our entire mission, and I’m confident I won’t be assigned to a different companion. But our little “district” (three sets of missionaries) got transfer news today, and they’re all being split up. We posed for one last selfie together.

Although it’s sad to see my new friends leave, they’re not really going all that far. I’ll see them in a few weeks when all the missionaries get together for a conference. And I’m excited to meet their replacements, the missionaries being transferred into the district.

So now we’ve finished our first transfer. Many more to come.

When it’s 115 degrees outside and the sun is beating town, you look for the shade.

Even if it means you’re on the far end of the parking lot, a quarter mile from the store doors.

Looking around the lot, all the trees had cars clustered under them, hiding from the heat. We’re learning.

They say it’s a small world, but even more so in the church. And even more so on a mission! For example, here we are a couple weeks ago with our friend Sister Holliday, who’d just become a missionary that morning.

She’s in Oregon serving a mission now, and she told us she has a friend serving a mission in Montana… who knows us.

And today I found out that Elder Hahn, who’s from Wyoming and serving a mission here in California with me, is a good friend of my nephew Ty, who’s serving a mission in Texas.

It seems that no matter where you are on a mission, you know someone who knows someone who knows you. Fun stuff.