Rio Branco - Week 11

My salsa turned out really good, and it was even better with the Fritos. I put it in the blender to make it kinda like the restaurant-style, more of a sauce. My only complaint is the peppers here are crappy. Not very hot, and very bland. But...oh well.

I had a nice surprise, I was looking through that box again and I found the rest of the Smarties! that I still hadn't eaten. Which was an awesome surprise :) But they didn't last long.

Also, I'm shocked and saddened that Five Guys decided NOW to make shakes. That is just cruel. I bet they're just the best shakes ever, aren't they :( What are all the flavors? Just so that you can make sure that I'm thoroughly tortured? Just tell me all about them, why don't you? :) Argh. Curse this Brazilian Five-Guys-less wilderness.

For breakfast lately, I've invented a new thing. They have this stuff here called Toddy, or Nescau, or Italac, there's lots of different brands, but it's chocolate powder to make chocolate milk. Just add the pó [powder] to milk and stir or whatever. So...I've been making a peanut butter sandwich, except instead of Nutella which is prohibitively expensive, I put this Toddy stuff! So it's literally just peanut butter and...powdered chocolate hahahaha. It's really good, and it's kinda dry so it's even more amazing with chocolate milk. By the way, chocolate milk is 2,59 reais per liter. So...I go through a lot :)

Also, another unrelated development is that we did a deep cleaning this morning, and so I had a very unfamiliar, although refreshing, experience. I walked around the house in my bare feet! It was very strange, but I'm hoping that we can keep the house this way so that I can keep walking around without slides. Super nice feeling, you guys are punks.

Our lunches fall through about twice every month here. So yeah, I miss Barbara :/ But Elder Vasconcelos makes a really mean macarrão [macaroni] with salsicha [sausage]. OH, that reminds me. One awesome thing that I ate this past week was this French fries thing, that this lady started selling close to our house. It's a styrofoam clamshell full of French fries, and you can get little bits of chicken, bacon, and calabresa [pepperoni]. And she has mayonnaise, ketchup, mustard, catupiry (a cheeseish kinda thing) and cheddar sauce. Oh and garlic sauce. It's 6 reais for the full thing, and it's awesome. I thought that it would be a GREAT idea to sell at football games! It was just little bacon bits and bits of chicken and stuff, and then the sauces were free. It was super good though.

My clothes/supplies are holding up great! On one of my shirts, one of the buttons that buttons down the collar fell off somehow, so I just don't button the collar and it's fine. Um...I think everything else is going good though.

As for health issues, I think I'm free. Occasional gripe [a cold], but it's okay. Normal, anyways.

I don't think I have anything/one that you guys need to pray for. Just me, in general :) As for a time when I felt protected...I guess one time was that all 4 of us were walking back from lunch and I was just barely walking on the sidewalk. And then all of a sudden I stepped up onto the sidewalk and an ônibus passed like 2 inches from my arm. Pretty scary, but I feel like I was protected then. :)

So this week...we got a reference from a member (woohoo! finally!), of a person who lives on our same road. Super close. And it's Christina, who has 40ish years, not really sure, but she's really interested. She also has to stop smoking. So she might get baptized this month (maybe you guys can pray that I don't get transferred. Hahaha just kidding :) ). And we also have the couple Wellington and Mary. Mary is kinda iffy, but Wellington is super interested and wants to get baptized. As for William and Laura, we haven't been able to find them both at home, so...dunno what's going to happen. And we found Vanessa, who is 20 years old. She went to church yesterday, so that was good. So...yeah. As for cool experiences...nothing much happened. Except that Saturday we found ourselves lacking 10 lessons to hit our weekly goal, and so we had to rush around to make that up. But we made it! 10 lessons for us is a lot in one day. It's usually 4ish. And I also had to talk to 32 people to hit my goal. But it worked out well.

And it's our last P-day of the transfer...this time next week I might be headed off to somewhere new! I hope not though. So yeah, I think that's about it. I love you Mom! :)