July 5th

Well it has been one heck of a week here in my new area Ft. Belvoir C! The reason my email is so late this week is because of the crazy storm we had run through here on Friday. I've never seen anything like that before in my life! It was like the storm was happening right over our apartment! There was green, red, and blue lightening non stop outside our apartment. We (my companion and I and our 2 roommates) though for sure we were going to die or something haha. It knocked our power out immediately, us and 3 million other people, around 10 Friday night. So we all just gathered around the sliding glass door not so calmly and watched the craziness going on outside. We were pretty convinced it was either aliens, or us being invaded by the Russians or the Chinese haha. Which wasn't that far of a stretch because it was just all of a sudden we had no power, no service on our phones, the sky was like exploding, and outside people kept running out into their cars and leaving... and we have no access to any kind of news ever so we just had no idea what the heck was going on haha. We survived totally fine and completely unharmed though. Our power was out until Sunday though, which was rough for no A/C, but we got to spend Saturday doing lots of service! There were completely uprooted trees all over the roads and in peoples yards that we were able to help move. I think they said there was only 3 casualties though, 2 from trees coming down on houses and 1 from a tree coming down on a car. Craziness! On a lighter note though my new area is great so far! My new companion is Elder Kessler. He is a great guy and so far we get along great. He was the quarterback for Utah State before he came on his mission and he's from Southern California. He hasn't been out on his mission very long either though, he actually just came out with Elder Anderson. Which is crazy to think but that was almost 6 months ago now! We are on bikes though still, which I'm totally fine with haha, I like biking. We are called the Ft. Belvoir area because of our area almost entirely consisting of the Ft. Belvoir military base here in Alexandria. So that is super sweet too. The downside to that though is we aren't allowed to proselyte on base so we have to be let into the base by a member who lives there. Something very unique about this area though is we share the exact same boundaries as 2 other missionary companionships: our roommates Elder Frazier and Elder Dickson (Elder Dickson was in our zone back in McLean so that's really cool) who are Ft Belvoir A, and the Assistants to the President Elder Johnson and Elder Parker who are Ft. Belvoir B. We are the only one out of the three without a car though... not sure how that works haha. Oh something else kind of cool about being here now too though is I'm now a district leader. Which really just means that I'm in charge of keeping track of how a few companionships in our zone (my district) our doing and I have to prepare some sort of lesson every week to teach to our district every Tuesday. So all around it's an exciting new place to be! Granted it's not quite as cool as sterling, but it's still a great place! It sounds like this past week has been an exciting one for my family in Vegas with Callie, Sadie, and Gracie visiting too! Man and a bummer about this new area's library though is that it's in a new county so we have new library rules and here the computer logs you off after only 45 minutes :/ so I've got to call it good for the day but I will be able to send another email in just a few days! I hope all is well with everyone wherever you are!