Rose Parade float decorating

Hey mom and dad! Okay, so I've been super busy this week, and now I'm trying to put all my thoughts into an email that I've gotta write in 20 minutes.

I'm going to be brief and write about our investigators. Right now, Patricia is keeping on strong with her baptismal date for the 20th of June. Hilda, one of our old investigators has now come to church two weeks in a row and is keeping her commitments, so her baptismal date is set for the 27th of June, and if the Perez get their crap together this week, they'll also have a baptismal date set for the 27th of June, but they're having some marital/family problems that I'm not gonna discuss on here. Aside from that, it's been a lot of first lessons, knocking, and trying to find new people.

Oh! I also had the opportunity to go back to Salem on an exchange with elder Jimenez for a day, and it was a good time! Ah I love that area. Not saying that I don't love Woodburn, because I actually love it more, but Salem will always hold a special place in my heart because it's where I started.... Man that's crazy I arrived there more than six months ago!

Anyways, things are good here, and I wanted to tell you about the things that happened today! So, today is actually not technically our P-day because we're taking it tomorrow to go to the zoo with our entire zone, but today as a zone we went and helped decorate floats for the Rose Parade, which was sweet! Oh my goodness there are some SAWEET houses on the way into portland! We came in from Newberg and cut over through tigard/beaverton area into the hills there, and oh my gosh... I want to have a house there someday! Absolutely beautiful. Then we got to the float decorating place, and I had to laugh... theyr'e trying to use as many "green" materials as possible, so we were plasting corn meal, coconut, parsley, and all sorts of other stuff to these floats to give them color, and it looked saweet! One thing that was kind of Ironic though... we were doing it for the salvation army.... go figure... LDS missionaries working for the Salvation Army. A couple of the other missionaries were giving us crap and saying that we had "apostatized" from the true church. The funny thing was that they happened to be working on a float for the Spirit Mountain Casino.... at least we were working for a church and not a casino...right?

That was super fun though. We took our lunch and decided to head downtown and eat at one of the many trendy little stands that you find, and it was fuhreaking good! Oh man we stuck out like nothing else it seemed like though haha. Eight spanish-speaking not hipster-vested happy laughing people wandering around and eating food. After that we went back to decorating for a little while, but then had to head out. After we headed out, we decided to stop at Powell's book store because supposedly it's one of the best bookstores ever.... turns out they were RIGHT! Holy crap that place is way sweet! I'm pretty sure I'll be headed back there to buy some books sometime soon. After that though, we went to a sweet store where I've decided i'm going to be buying a lot of clothes... haha you're all going to laugh, but Urban Outfitters. They've got some pretty rad stuff there! I think the Portland culture is starting to get to me because I really like the way the people dress here. Granted, there are the large share of "non-conformist" hipsters who ride fixies, have mustaches, sport satchel bags, and have horn-rimmed glasses, but aside from them, there are a ton of things I like... especially in that store. Anyways, I'm just really starting to love this place, and pretty much falling in love with Portland... Still don't know if I'd wanna live here because it rains so dang much, but it's a freakin' sweet place.

All right I've gotta bail, but I love you guys and I hope everything is going super well for you. Mom, don't stress about camp. Just have a blast, okay?

Love,

Elder Kurt Kay Mooney