from Brazil...

Here's this weeks email from our missionary:

Oí família, We baptized again this week! I took pictures but i forgot to bring my camera with me today.Next week I´ll send pics. The baptism went well, her name is cecilia and she is good friends with the other kids we baptized these past few weeks. Transfers were this week too and...... I stayed the same. Elder Camargo went to Rio Verde and Elder Summerhayes is my companion now, he´s from Seatle Washington. He´s cool and a good missionary. When elder Camargo was packing up his stuff, we were talking and he said that i was his only companion that never argued with him or he never argued with. I was a bit surprised because he has a year and a half on the misson and has had a number of comps.... Aaron is in the mission neighboring mine now. The missions already combined. When i was in Uberlândia, I was in the same state as him. So he is pretty close to me. And Andrew Millet is in the mission next to me too, but on the other side. Aaron is on the right side and Andrew is on the left side. But all is good here in Anápolis and i will stay here for at least another 6 weeks....One of the elders in my zone used to be a professional soccer player before the mission on a very well known team, Palmeiras. And he droped everything he had going for him to go on a mission. So he came to our area and was a motivotional speaker. everyone here is crazy about soccer. But the activity didn´t go so well because of other things that were out of our hands, but we still had investigators there so that was good. Now that´s it , ask questions if you have any. Tchau Elder Lewis

This weekend...

This weekend was just a fine ol regular normal weekend. .. AND normal to me means WONDERFUL! I love normal! So some of the normal regular stuff was(in no particular order):
Help decorate a reception/party... something I used to do a lot (I kinda miss it)so it was great fun. Trent even helped... just like old times... Went to the reception/party of a dear friend of mine.... It was great to see how happy the two newlyweds were and great to see friends that were so much a part of my life for many years... and then we stayed to help tear down.. thanks Mike and Trent... which was also great fun cuz it was more time to catch up with my friends. ALSO... this weekend... we slept in... twice, I got new tires on my car... now it REALLY needs a wash, Mike worked on the floor some more, I went to the grocery store and the Mall, cooked, baked some brownies, ate brownies and ice cream... YUM... cleaned, did laundry ... almost finished, went swimming a little... I'm close to off white now... planned our primary leson, watched a movie and ate popcorn with Mike, decorated the bedroom a bit ... it's lookin good, checked out some new recipes I wanna try... went to church and now I'm blogging a little. Yep... It was a regular normal weekend... and I loved every bit of it!

from our missionary...

Here's the latest from Brazil and also a challenge to all of us!

Oí familia - Hey we baptized again! We baptized Luan and he´s 11 and he is one of the kids that asked us to be baptized.(Blessings from God) some others asked us if they could be baptized and we´ll baptize Cecilia next week. We don´t baptize at our church, we have to go to the stake center in the center of the city to baptize. Cecilia, who we´ll baptize next week, has learned tons of stuff already. It´s crazy because we haven´t taught alot of stuff to her yet but she already knows from reading the book of mormon, and remembering. Memory seems to be a nationwide fault here in Brasil. But it´s all good. We also had a conference with President Tobias the week which was good. We learned alot about leadership skills and acccomplishing our goals. We want to beat the missions in northeast brazil. The missions up there baptize a TON every month and we want those numbers down here in the central part. Sister Tobias also talked alot about health because it´s winter now and she doesn´t want anyone to get sick. It´s still warm here though. Arizona´s winters are alot colder. It gets cold for about 2 days a week and then back to warm. Cold is about 60 degrees and warm is about 85. But conference was good. President was playing with us at the end because he is going to have his 3rd baptism next week and he doesn´t do any tracting or anything like that. So you guys at home can still baptize people while not doing missionary `work´, but just talking to people that walk by you or you come across. That´s about it for my week so if you have any more questions just ask. Tchau Elder Lewis

We made it!

WARNING!!! This is a very LONG post but it covers a very LONG trip (1600 miles)! Friday was like a fun little mini vacation for me. I flew in to Nashville on a very early flight Friday morning.. Dustin and Joslyn picked me up and we had lunch at Mc D's (a popular stop on the trip)... and then we made a little detour and stopped at the Amish store. I just love driving into the Amish area... it is always beautiful and green and clean.
The corn fields were plentiful in Kentucky. I wish they were ready to harvest...

We went into this Amish store... I wished I lived by one of these.. It was food storage heaven.... bulk food, fresh butter and canned stuff (and the BEST gummy worms I've ever eaten... really!) and the coolest thing was they had a big glass window you could look through and watch the women make this stuff. I sooo wanted to take a picture of them because I was so impressed.. but I respected their culture and privacy.
Next stop was The kids home

and here is a picture of their newest addition... Snowball the rat!

We did a little family time and got ready to go to my favorite place for dinner...

The Wood Shed!!!! I can't say enough about how GOOD (everything I've had is great... I go there everytime I'm in Kentucky) and cheap their food is!!! They should spotlight this place on the food channel!

I had the catfish dinner.. only $5.95 and the best I've ever eaten! The hushpuppies are heavenly and the coleslaw and white beans... YUM!

Great down home cookin and very friendly people. We all had full happy tummies!

But no matter how full ya can't leave without some homemade pie!

So I had some great family time before we started out on the great adventure. Not too many pics.. we were on a mission to get to AZ in two days... It was dark when we left home and this is Missouri... we drove through All of the ozarks I think and we saw TREES for hours!

Sleep time...

great travelers...

Breakfast at McD's... Mmmmmmm

On to Oklahoma... I was trying to get a picture of that indian statue

VERY windy here... which was the ONLY bad part of the trip. We both got dust embedded eyes and Aimee had an eye that looked like a cherry by the time we got to the hotel. Everywhere we stopped the wind and dust sandblasted our eyes. Something we did not anticipate.. We got medicine for Aimees eye and it got better and I ruined my first pair of contacts.. wore my glasses part of the time (and had my sunglasses on top of them... I did NOT look glasmorous on this trip) then used another pair of contacts! I'm staying home from work today not because I'm tired, but to get my eyes back to normal.. because I can't even think about putting contacts in my eyes!

We stayed at the Hampton Inn in Clinton Oklahoma (yep we checked out the big cities!) we just COULDN'T drive any further... VERY nice and a much needed place to rest. We drove for 14 hours on Saturday!

All ready for another day of driving!

Amarillo by morning!!... here we are at ANOTHER McD's

We saw a LOT of NOTHING in Texas...

See all the WIND... STILL windy when we stopped in Tucumcari New Mexico.

Happy little travelers! (with a little help from grammy's bag of STUFF that would appear at just the right time!)
A whole LOT more NOTHING in New Mexico! If the world gets too overpopulated there is plenty of room still in Texas and New Mexico!

Yay.. a Taco Bell this time... (I can't believe how excited I was for Taco Bell!) we really ate high on the hog on this trip! (notice Aimee is covering her eye... see eye story above)

The end of the trip... most of the car is covered in bug guts from several states. We drove 15 hours on Sunday. I don't have a great here we are at home finally pic cuz it was late, dark and we just wanted to get to bed and close ours eyes and hope our eyeballs would still be there in the morning. But I will say that this 1600 mile long trip was very pleasant, the weather was good, the car drove smooth, the girls were cute and great and Aimee was a joy to be with. We are VERY thankful (and thanks to map quest... we never got lost once... although we questioned a little of mapquests definition of HIGHWAY through some little towns in Kentucky and Missouri)that we made it home safely!Family is great and it is GREAT to be home!

Trip time...

It's trip time for me... first thing in the morning I'm flying to Nashville/Kentucky.... THEN... a 1600 mile road trip back home! Not really a vacation... just driving from there to here with Aimee and the girls ...BUT I'm sure there will be some fun and great sights along the way. Of course I'll post about it when I get back... hopefully Sunday night! Have a great weekend everyone!

from Brazil...

Here's the weekly news from Brazil...

Oí família - Everything is going good here and good to hear that the demolition is almost done. The furniture looks nice and the airplane pics are cool. My companion is crazy about airplanes, He took a piloting course before the mission. This week we conferred Bruno and Suelen who were baptized last week and I did one of the confirmations! It was my first one and i was a bit nervous but it was all good. The remodeling is supposed to start soon and they are going to enclose the chapel because tons of dust and crap comes in every week and it takes forever to clean.We are also going to get some classrooms and everything is going to get painted nice and it should be an actual chapel when its all done. When they start it will be about 30-45 days until we can meet there again so we will probably have church at someone´s house for a while. But it´s all good. We should baptize again this saturday when we get Luan´s mom to sign the baptism papers. That´s about it for the week. We are going to have a zone conference tomorrow with the president and those are always good. You always learn something in a zone conference. I didn´t take any pictures this week so i don´t have anything exciting to send to you guys... I´ll see you all later then. Tchau Elder Lewis

The weekend...

This past weekend was MORE demo of course... but it is ALMOST over!

LOTS and LOTS of demo.... and what I didn't really realize was how MUCH

DUST there would be!!!! My WHOLE house looks like this!!! BUT.... I went to the store and bought every kind of cleaner for every kind of surface... so eventually it will be back to normal. When we sit down to eat then get up we have to do a bum check to make sure we don't go out of the house with dusty bums! THAT would be embarrassing!

But the fun news is my last piece to the bedroom set came and I went shopping...

... I bought a couple of buffet lamps for our nightstands. So besides making sure Mike had cold drinks (like fresh lemonade), getting my nails done (I did black toes... first time... no pic, I don't do feet pics), cooking (did a new yummy 30 minute roll recipe), cleaning (some dust), grocery shopping (great coupon savings), laundry(should have done more... still have some), church (was wonderful),sleep (didn't have to get up at 4!), a quick dip in the pool (it's one way to get the dust off), and going through one of my tubs (I'm saving that for another post) that was pretty much my exciting weekend!