2 months?!

 

Maybe I coulda been a little clearer in my last email, so I'll try to clear some things up. Sister Torres and I did this object lesson on faith that is usually pretty cool. I hold this tea bag standing up in my hand and Sister Torres takes a lighter and lights the top of it. The bag burns and gets insanely close to my hand and gets really hot and then it flies away. Well, ideally that's what happens. This time it just kinda fell over in my hand and burned there until I dropped it on the floor. Sorry if yall were hoping I ran across a crazy person's house :)

This week I started biking. It's not as terrible of an experience as it seems and it is better than walking. And let me tell ya, that bike helmet really completes the outfit. I'll definitely have to bike in a skirt with my helmet more often when I'm home!

This week we had the most amazing miracle ever! I GOT TO EAT PIZZA! Can we just all take a moment to appreciate pizza? I'm sorry, I've not had it since the MTC and I don't think anyone understands how excited I was to eat pizza even if it was the most overpriced pizza ever. I also got some ice cream cake at one of our dinners this week (which was delicious!) and even went through some oreos and mountain dew.

Man I was so tired this week. I'm pretty sure I dozed off a couple times during one lesson this week. Oops. This is why we shouldn't leave the lights really dim and sit on a super comfy couch.

I'm pretty sure I'm getting old. I keep forgetting things all the time. Like not mission related things, but stuff like I can't remember what all 3 of the unforgivable curses are!? Like seriously, who forgets that?! It also took me 10 minutes the other day to remember one of my friend's names.

It's been a little foggy here lately. Apparently there are a ton of fires in Washington and Idaho and maybe Nevada..? I'm not sure exactly but sometimes we can't see the mountains because of the smog.

Update: last week I ate zuchini and squash and this week I ate some cabbage. My review: I imagine that to be what nail polish remover tastes like.

Also, if you haven't seen Elder Holland's Mormon Message "Testimony of the Book of Mormon" then you need to repent and watch it. Ok, maybe that's a little extreme but really you need to watch it cuz it's a pretty awesome video!
I'm probably the only one that noticed, but today's my birthday! Well, my mission birthday. I've now been on my mission for 2 months! Crazy right? I bought myself a cupcake in celebration. Any excuse to eat cupcakes is a good excuse.

Here is my address for those of you that were looking for it:
233 Croydon Ct

Spring Creek, NV 89815

And here's my phone number:

317-446-5688 ;) ya that'll totally work



The helmet really does look great, doesn't it?

 

 Here's a picture from last Monday when President Chesnut came by and surprised us! It was for sure a surprise because the mission office is about 5 hours from Spring Creek.

Love and miss you all!

Sister Ashley Gootee :)

1 Transfer Down

Hello all! Not as much happened this week, but I feel we can all be grateful for that. I'm always glad when car accidents and food poisoning are not involved :)

Well tomorrow is transfer day. I'm being transferred to downtown Reno. I've heard it's pretty sketchy. JK, missions don't send sisters there :) I'll be in Spring Creek for another transfer at least! This little town is kinda growing on me. Who woulda thought that I could live in a town that doesn't even have a stoplight?

Sister Torres and I are doing great. It's awesome because you can see our different strengths. Before her mission she was vegan so at dinners I always let her know what kind of meat we are eating because she usually doesn't know. Before my mission, I was definitely 100% not vegan, so Sister Torres lets me know what kind of disgusting..I mean delicious..veggies we are eating. I had squash and zuchini last week. That may have been the first time I've eaten those before.

This week we had a lesson with this one family we've been teaching again. We related Harry Potter to the gospel and the son at the end asked us if it connected in any other ways. Challenge accepted.

We got to go to the ward campout the other night! Well, we went to the dinner and fireside and then left after I entirely pigged out on s'mores. They were so delicious! It was a super pretty area that they were camping out in. There were legit trees everywhere and real grass and everything! There were so many trees that you couldn't see the mountains #blessings

Speaking of foilage and such, people here mow their weeds. During relief society the teacher was talking about how she remembers mowing the weeds with her dad when she was younger. The things people say in Nevada...

An amazing miracle we had this week is we taught this girl named Daisy for the first time this week. Her family is active but they want to help her work toward baptism. The miracle, however, is they gave me cookies n cream ice cream. You can pretty much say they are my favorite family now.

Something that I've learned on my mission is how important prayer is. I knew it was important before my mission, but I never really realized that it is a commandment to pray often. As I was thinking about why it would be so important I thought of an analogy. It's like when we were 2 or 3 and thought we were super independent and could do everything ourselves. However, our mom knew better and would always advise us to ask her for help so that we wouldn't make a mess of things and so that we could do things the way she wants us to have it done. It's a lot like Heavenly Father and us because we are a lot less experienced and like to think out of pride that we can do things on our own and don't need His help. However, Heavenly Father wants everything to go well in our lives so He wants us to pray and ask for help.

Well, I got through a transfer of my mission. I survived waking up at 6 or 6:30 every morning and I survived so many dinner appointments (which, for those of you who don't know me, is pretty impressive to me at least). I survived a car accident and food poisoning and getting lit on fire (oh I guess I never told y'all about that. Oh well).

Love and miss you all!

Sister Ashley Gootee :)

Not Dead Yet

Wow this was a pretty slow week! I'll try to come up with some interesting things as not much happened.

Well, Sister Torres and I got into a car accident on Thursday. No worries, we are absolutely fine! Someone ran a stop sign and hit the front right side of our car, so our car is kinda sorta totalled. The amazing thing is that if we were going a little bit faster or if he pulled out a little bit later then he would have hit me instead of just getting the car. It's definitely a miracle that there wasn't even a scratch on me!

Sister Torres and I were a little slap happy afterwards. We kept joking around on the side of the road and it was actually pretty fun. I really wanted to ask the other guy if he'd ever run into missionaries before but I didn't think I could say it with a straight face.

There were a lot of people freaking out after because they just heard that we were in an accident but didn't know details. We called Elder Zappe, the vehicle coordinator, as soon as it happened and then President Chesnut called us that night. The sister training leaders and district leader were also making sure we were ok. So no worries, we're pretty well taken care of!

As I said earlier, our car, Bertha, died. However, as we are sister missionaries, Elder Zappe drove the 5 hour drive to Spring Creek to give us our new truck! Well, new to us. We named it Bell, after the Baileys' little chihuaha. And it was super nice because we only had to go one day without a car.

Other than the car accident, not much else happened this week. I mean, I guess I got food poisoning. Apparently people aren't supposed to feed you undercooked chicken. Who knew? So ya, I was sick for a whole day after and every time I would eat I would get sick. I came to the realization that if I didn't eat, then I wouldn't get sick :) Unfortunately, I've heard food is a necessity for life. So that night I got a blessing so that I'd be able to keep food down. It was awesome because when I got home I ate some food (fried chicken, cuz I was starving and fried chicken is delicious) and didn't get sick at all! So that was definitely a miracle!

As I mentioned last time, I tutored a girl in math last week. She passed her test so that's pretty awesome!

We also got 4 or 5 new investigators this week! To give some perspective, we got 2 new ones in the first month of my mission. So that's pretty awesome!

I'm also going to be sending a picture of one of the girls that is in a family that we've been teaching. Her name is Lizzie and she's pretty awesome!

Also, my hatred for dogs is growing. The other day we went to a house and their dog licked and bit my legs for half an hour. I literally put hand sanitizer all over my legs when we got in the car. Another time a dog wiped it's nose on my skirt. So disgusting. I can't handle dogs

Love and miss you all!

Sister Ashley Gootee

Already a month?

Hello everyone! I've been out a month now, which is super crazy because it doesn't feel like I've been in Nevada for 3 weeks already! It really is true that the days are weeks and the weeks are days :) Every time I get to Saturday I'm like "oh wait, I guess it's not Tuesday."

Anyway, I'll try to update you guys on things from this week and things I've forgotten to mention. So, Sister Torres is awesome. We're laughing pretty much all the time. The other night we went to a relief society activity and there was so much cake and sugar so I may have been a tad sugar high for a few minutes. But we laughed pretty much the whole activity because we're both pretty much the funniest people ever (I mean, you all already knew that about me :) ), and I think the relief society may think we're crazy now. But oh well.

We've also learned to laugh at people who reject us. Some people are terrible liars. I mean terrible. Especially considering for some reason many people in Spring Creek have their last name somewhere on their porch, we can tell if you're lying about who you are. Also, if you change your story 3 times in our 2 minute conversation, you may need to work on your lying. Or meet with the missionaries so you can give up your habit of lying. The latter is preferred :)

Sister Torres is awesome though. I didn't mention this before, but she's a convert and joined the church when she was 15. She decided while she was taking the discussions that she wanted to go on a mission.

My district is pretty cool too. We do morning program everyday, which is us exercising at 6:30 in the morning. There are 8 people in our district and usually we have 6 of us there at morning program.

Something cool I learned this week is about (you guessed it) visiting and home teaching!!! Aren't y'all so glad I'm teaching you so much about it? :) So anyway, visiting and home teaching isn't a calling it's a commission. So not to be blunt or anything, but we've kinda all covenanted with God that we'd do it so ya know, we should do it. It's kinda a big deal...

Anyways, there may be more dogs than people in Spring Creek. This last week we had 5 dogs in our house. The Baileys have 2 chihuahuas that are the most pampered things in the universe. No but really, they don't get fed dog food, they probably get fed better than I do, which is saying something. The Baileys were also watching their kids' two dogs last week. They're a lot bigger than chihuahuas and they stayed outside cuz for some reason chihuahuas and big dogs don't get along. They also had this dog that was the most adorable dog I've ever seen (no, but really, I would pet her and stuff! I drew the line when she licked me. I haven't pet her since then...). Her name's Ruby and she's adorable but I've never heard anyone or any dog snore as loud as she does.

Last week we were doing our nightly planning and Ruby came up and Sister Torres was petting her. When she left we realized she was sitting on Sister Torres's planner and there was a little drippage left over after....We laughed a lot, mainly because it wasn't my planner. No one would have been laughing then.

Anyway, here's some things I will not be doing after my mission:

-Waking up at 6 in the morning. Or anytime before 8:30 unless my life depends on it.

-Exercising at 6:30 in the morning. You'll be lucky to get me to exercise any time before noon after my mission.

-Owning a dog. Those things are annoying. Sorry guys, haven't gotten over that on my mission.

-Washing a car in a dress. We'll see if I wash cars by hand after my mission, but I'll definitely not be wearing proselyting clothes to do it after my mission.

-Eating salad. Or noodles. Like, ever. That stuff's gross.

Anyway I'm having a great time! It's been going by pretty fast and we've been busy all the time! And no worries, I'm being fed every day for dinner and I've been cooking on my George Foreman grill for lunch :) No complaints here!

Love and miss you all!

Sister Ashley Gootee :)

Another week down!

Ok so I forgot to say some stuffs about Spring Creek last week when I emailed. So I'll try to review...

So the first week it rained a ton. And rain here isn't like Indiana rain. Here the rain drops are humungous and they hurt when they hit you. Also, when you look out the window, it looks like monsoon season. The rain smells like mint here which is very strange...

The days it hasn't rained it's been pretty nice. The weather has been pretty good with a lot of days in the high of 80s and lows of 50s. The first night it didn't rain I got to watch the sunset over the mountains, which is awesome with the Ruby Mountains! It's so cool! The mountains kinda change colors. You'll have to look at some pictures on Google. Also, you can see the stars really well here! That's the benefit of living in the middle of nowhere.

Speaking of the middle of nowhere, I said I was from Indiana and lived close to Indianapolis and someone was like "oh so that's a lot like Nevada, with not a ton of people." I had to correct them...there's a little bit of a difference as Indianapolis has a greater population than the state of Nevada.

By the way, you all should do your visiting and home teaching.

Also, along with everyone and their mother owning a dog, everyone here works in the mines. It's crazy! They all have super crazy schedules!

Oh, I forgot to mention, home and visiting teaching are super important.

I've taught over 20 lessons since I got here! It's crazy. We've been teaching a lot of less active members and a few investigators :) We have some solid investigators! We've also had dinner appointments every night and aside from getting fed salad almost every night it's been great :)

Oh wow, can't believe I almost forgot, but visiting teaching and home teaching are really really really important.  Most wards have about 300 people in the ward. We have 300 households. It's kinda impossible for me and Sister Torres to go and visit everyone, so we're trying to motivate the ward to visit and home teach more. The awesome thing is, if you can't get ahold of someone you're home and visiting teaching, ask the missionaries to go with you! They'd love to help :)

Anyway, that's all that I can really think of for this week. It is with great pain that I ask you all to send me Dominos and Subway gift cards if you are wanting to send me stuff. I feel disgusted saying that, but that's all they have here.

Life in Nevada

Hello! So this letter is going to be a little shorter but anyway...

I am serving in Spring Creek, Nevada. It's about 25 minutes or so from Elko. It took about 5 hours to get here from Reno so that was a crazy long drive! Also, side note...everyone here measures distance in miles...? It's super weird cuz I'll say I live about 20 minutes from Indianapolis and everyone looks at me like I'm crazy for measuring distance in minutes. It's also weird because people will tell me that somewhere is 30 miles away and I have to ask them how long they're driving or how fast they're going so I can translate to Indiana talk. That was a random side not, but anyway...
So Sister Torres is my trainer and she's awesome! She's from Florida and we're a lot alike. We both love fast food, despite Subway and Dominos being the only fast food places within a 25 minute drive. She also drinks Dr Pepper a lot so she doesn't judge me for my Mountain Dew intake. We get along super well though so it's been pretty fun!

Man our apartment is a dump. Jk that's cuz it doesn't exist. We live in a member's home. They're the Baileys and they're pretty cool. Brother Bailey owns a business where he designs homes and then the people that work for him build the homes. Their house is awesome! Also, we have a house cleaner that comes in so that's great because I don't have to clean bathrooms or anything. The pictures I have attached of the landscape is our view from the front lawn, which we can also see from our desk that we study at.

Everyone and their mother here owns a dog. No kidding. Every house we go to there is at least one.

Everyone here also knows a Mormon. It's pretty much a mini-Utah out here and everyone is super nice. We've done a ton of work with less actives. The only unfortunate thing is the ward slacks on signing up for dinners on our calendar. Oh wait...We have one night in the next 3 or 4 weeks that we don't have a dinner appointment for. So glad I'm a sister cuz that means people feed us :)

The ward mission leader is Brother Hadley. I was talking to him and found out that both of his parents grew up in Brazil, Indiana. So that's awesome! He and his wife are super cool. We actually used to be in charge of our dinner calendar and had half of our nights filled for dinner appointments, but since she took charge of it this week she got all of our nights filled. So that's awesome!

I'm going to send a ton of pictures now because they won't attach

Love you all!

Sister Ashley Gootee

So much to tell everyone but so little time.... This letter may be a little random :)

So teaching is awesome! Sister Paul and I taught so many lessons this week! There was this one we had prepared a ton for and were ready to teach him the Plan of Salvation. We had our game plan ready and we went in and started talking to our investigator, Joseph. As we talked and said an opening prayer, Sister Paul and I felt prompted to go a completely different direction. After the prayer, I read a conference quote about God's love for us and we talked for 20 minutes about God and how much he wants to hear from us in prayer. My mouth was seriously filled with what to say as I spoke. The spirit is amazing!

Another day this week my district had a testimony meeting. As many people know, I have anxiety problems so doing anything in front of a group of people terrifies me and I get so nervous. I felt like I should bear my testimony to the 15 other people in my district meeting, and I've never felt so calm. It was seriously as if I was having a casual conversation with a good friend instead of bearing my testimony to a group of people I hardly know.

I'm talking a lot about lessons but that's seriously my life here. So we taught another investigator named Ny (who is actually not one of our teachers and could be a legit nonmember) and we taught about the Book of Mormon. We asked her to read 1 Nephi 1 and when she came back for the next lesson she had so many questions. We spent the entire 25 minutes answering questions about the first 5 or 6 verses of 1 Nephi 1. I had no idea I knew so much about the Book of Mormon! And every question we didn't know we found out soon after the lesson! I even found a scripture that talked about prophets warning the people of the destruction of Jerusalem in the Bible, so ya the Church is pretty much completely true :)

So the Fourth of July is kinda lame here. Our teachers got us excited for this fun activity thing and then we all got there and it was a devotional. The speaker was a professor from BYU and he went on for close to an hour and a half. If I was ever considering taking a history of religion class, I know without a doubt now that I never will. He also spoke for so long that it went until 10 and we missed some of the fireworks. Not that we could really see them from the MTC parking lot anyway....

On Sunday we met Stephanie Nielson from the Mormon Message "My New Life." We just ran into her during our temple walk and we all got to take a picture with her. Unfortunately, we didn't get to talk to her very much.

Speaking of Mormon Messages, y'all need to see "Lift." It's seriously the most amazing video ever! Also, Sister Anderson's Texas pride may be wearing off on me. She's hung a Texas flag in our room and I've started saying y'all sometimes (which I had to ask her how to spell and all :) ).

Last night we had a great devotional with Jenny Oaks Baker. For those of you that don't know, her dad's kinda a big deal. I mean, he's Elder Oaks, ya know the apostle. Jenny is also a professional violinist and played some for us. She even performed with her kids and it was amazing! I believe her kids are 13, 12, 10, and 8 and they played the violin, piano, cello, and guitar. The music was amazing and I learned so much from what she said.

I didn't tell you guys last week about the amazing devotional we watched from Elder Bednar called "Character of Christ." The talk for some reason can only be found at the MTC and it's amazing! He talked a lot about the difference between having a testimony and being truly converted. He also talked about turning outward and selflessly serving in order to work toward having the character of Christ. He also compared the natural man to Cookie Monster, and seriously who doesn't want to see Elder Bednar impersonate Cookie Monster? But in all seriousness, that talk is seriously life changing!

Also, as a random side note, I slept in til 7:30 yesterday and it was glorious! We had stayed up until almost midnight the night before because of fireworks and talking and such so that was much needed!

I also forgot to tell y'all that I will be for sure riding a bike on my mission...I prepared a little bit by riding about 4 miles on a stationary bike in 20 minutes on Friday, and I didn't die during or after, so I think I may be fine...Pray for me :)

From the depth of my soul, I must request that you all see Legacy. Never in my life have I seen such superb acting and I strive daily to emulate such quality. I learned so much, including some pick up lines of the century (well, maybe the 19th century). Becca, take note because I expect you to use this line. I really should've given it to you before you left EFY but whatever..."I'll miss you! After tribulation cometh the blessing." Man those actors were some smooth talkers and let me tell ya about the extreme amount of hand holding and hugging in the movie. I also learned how to turn down an ox nicely after having a deep heart to heart with it. "I know you've given your best but it isn't enough." Next time I have a deep heart to heart with my ox or even some random person (it could probably work for anyone!) I'll be sure to use that line. If all of this has not convinced you, the men's amazing hair will. Just wow. New favorite movie.

As a reward for getting this far, here are some things that are only said at the MTC. I'll be leaving tomorrow for Reno so enjoy :)
--If you see your companion falling asleep, punch them in the face.

--You have my permission to mug each other. Spiritually mug each other.

--You know a speaker's from Utah when he's talking about his trip to the Northeast, and then you realize he is talking about Ohio and somehow considers that to be the Northeast.

--Speaker at last Sunday's devotional: How many of you have gotten a Dear John/Dear Jane already? **He has them all stand.** Let's observe you and your battle scars. **pauses** Now for the rest of you, there's always mail tomorrow!

Love and miss you all!
Sister Ashley Gootee :)