An email with pictures

Glad to know you are both bored silly. Dad, I especially enjoyed your made up story about Vegas. My first idea that it was a joke was around where you said you actually went to Vegas. Yep, that definitely would have made it into Mom's email that I read first. I know you must be really bored when you start making up stories. I want you both to know that my crazy stories are 100% true, including washing my father's back.

Mom, I'm happy about my scrapbook. It's about time I graduated from high school, you know! As for the pictures of Hawaii, they can be found in my portable harddrive, which may or may not be in storage right now. I have a ton of pictures in there, but you probably wouldn't know what half of them meant.


Thanks for the package! We had to go to the mission office on Tuesday after our district meeting for my new companion to pass off her phone from the area she closed before coming here. As we were in the mission office, my package came! So perfect timing! I had to carry home all 8 lbs and whatever many ounces home with my in my bike, but it was totally worth it. I read the customs thing on the front, and it said 7 skirts! That more than doubles the total amount of skirts I had. Crazy. So of course I put them all on, at once. There is a picture attached (yes, I got the hint when I got that in my package).

The reason I look fat in that pictures is because I have 7 skirts on, and some of them are pulled up past my chest to get the layered look.

I thought you would enjoy that picture.

In other news, this week was interesting because it was our cleaning check. There is a senior missionary couple that comes around and checks the apartments to make sure they're clean. Really I think the mission just does that so the missionaries don't feel bad about taking time off going out and talking to people to clean. Anyway, this apartment was really gross. Every week we do things like clean the toilet, and clean out the sink drain, etc, but anything that is slightly hidden doesn't get cleaned out. This includes things like the filter in the AC unit (the AC works a lot better now, by the way), the filter to the stove vent, the fridge (poor Hobson Shimai had to clean that), and the random spare room with old clothes from dead (returned) missionaries. My job was the bathtub. In Japanese showers, it's just this big room. It has a big deep tub, and a shower facet, but it's basically one tiled room. Well, the tub is removable... in theory.

We had to clean under the tub... it was really really bad. We could see the mold starting to grow up the walls. Gross. Gross. So we started taking off the pipes from the tub to move it to the other half of the shower room, to clean where the tub is now, but there was one set of pipes that would have been really really terrible and a pain in the butt to have to move, so we ended up propping on a bucket, with about a foot to scrub underneath. Picture is attached. Once the tub was propped up on a bucket, and the picture was taken, my companions left me. There was this gross hair glob under the tub that I cleaned.

Of course I said things like GROSS at the top of my lungs the whole time, but it is now clean. There is an after picture too, but I don't think Gmail will let me attach that many pictures. In the picture please notice the mold on the pipes too. Yep, those are clean now too.

The couple that came to check the apartment were way nice. They took us to the Japanese equivalent of Bed, Bath, and Beyond, and we got new office chairs, and a Japanese style bed, not a futon. This bed is about 6 inches thick, and can still fold up like a futon. So if my companion with a bad back likes the bed, they might slowly start buying them for the mission. I'll keep you posted. Either way, the bed is still kinda hard. I don't know if I can sleep on a normal bed again. Anyway, the last picture is me with my companions in the back of the senior couple's car, with the bed we bought at the store.

That's the only picture I have right now with the three of us together.

We dropped by an old investigator's house this week, and the 12 year old girl said that she is reading this book called Tah-oo-rah-ee-toe.

She was really excited and ran to go get the book to show me. The cover was all emo Japanese manga style, but then I saw the word at the bottom. The book is Twilight! It's been translated into Japanese and this girl's teacher recommended it to her for the summer break (which is really really short in Japan - less than a month). So we shared a moment as I told her I read that book, and the author is from our church. Yep, that was pretty cool. I let her know that there are 4 books, and that I think she might like it.

I hope you enjoy the pictures. I'll try to do that every week. I just hope this email isn't too big for gmail, you know? Here I go. I think I have faith....

レモン　姉妹