Nov 30 - Galveston

Dear family and friends,

Happy Thanksgiving!!!! I am sorry but I only have 10 mintues left to write this weekly letter. This week was a week that consisted of talking to a lot of people and eating, and eating, and eating.Thanksgiving was a very cool day and probably one of my favorite things that we did was going to serve food for the Salvation Army. I don't remember doing this ever in my life and it was a really neat experience. I got the chance to bring big plates of food to people and sit down and talk to them for a while. I met a Laker fan who loved Kobe and a guy who had been all over California before. I also met a couple of people from Minnesota! It was a very cool experience and I want to do that again next year!

If any of you were worried about us and eating food on Thanksgiving, you shouldn't. Guess how many Thanksgiving dinners we had lined up. Yup, 7. Luckily a couple of people cancelled and one of the members just had us over to play games instead of eating so we ended up eating about one Thanksgiving breakfast and three dinners. Let's just say I was very, very full. My problem was not eating bad food, my problem was that all the food was sooo good, but I could not eat as much as I wanted to. It was one of those times that I wish I had the superpower that I could just eat forever! :)

The other thing we did this week was working on talking with more people on the streets. It's called opening your mouth (or OYMing). We have standards of excellence, basically goals that we have to be better missionaries. And one of the goals is to get 10 OYMs each day. So, 20 as a companionship. Elder Roberts and I really wanted to do this but it is pretty hard to do, even when you're on a bike! We devised a plan and made a deal. The deal was that if either of us did the 10 OYM's per day the other person would buy bluebell icecream for the other person. Bluebell icecream is the best and we love it so it helped us to be motivated. Well, we both did it so it's basically like buying bluebell for ourselves. Haha. Well, it was really fun to do that and it helped us find a couple of new people to teach and one of the people that we talked to wants to get baptized; so we will see how that goes!

I have to get going, I went a little over 10 minutes! Thanks for all the letters and the support!!!
-Elder Johnson