Out of Quarantine at Last

  Dear family, friends, people of the republic, enemies and Arch nemesis. I hope you are well. I can say with complete confidence that this week has been more eventful than the last. 

First of all, I finally decided to get my pea plant growing. I had decided to wait until my second transfer to start, and well, I'm on my second transfer and stuck inside the house, so no better time to do it. 

I got one of my soup cans, collected some dirt from around our apartment, and got ready to plant it. By the way, despite there being plenty of nature around here, it was more difficult than expected to find dirt. I had to grab a handful from around several bushes around the apartment. The dirt was a little weird too and bone dry. It had the beads of fertilizer in it that looked new. It was very powdery and had a lot of junk in it like hair,  and plastic, and many year old leaves. I cleaned out the dirt, and then worked on getting it wet. It took a long time and a lot of water but the fluffy dirt turned a kind of swampy which I was worried about. I had brought two seed packets along with two different kinds of pea seeds and I put one of each into the can. I pushed them in a little deep but thought they would be fine. When a week passed without either of them making an appearance, I was worried that the seeds had both dissolved, which is common when there is too much water in the dirt. I slowly poured out the dirt into a bowl,  and found that it was way too swampy in the bottom and I needed to punch a few more holes into it. one of the seeds had indeed disappeared, but all the way at the bottom of the can, there was a four inch long root, and a one inch sprout, trying to punch its way to the top. I gently pulled it out, resituated the dirt so it wouldn't sink in again, and left the little green top poking out. It is doing splendid and in just two days started to put out four leaves. I've already learned that I can't water it here, it doesn't dry out and the dirt only becomes swampy when I do. I love putting it out every morning and bringing it in every evening. Sadly, because of the shape of our porch and the apartments, it only gets about four hours of sunlight max, but its doing alright anyway. 

I need to ask Chris for a fresh start of a spinach vine, to go along with the pea

plant. 

 

Halfway through the week I received a lovingly packed box of candies for general conference, including a package of candy corn that I immediately recognized the purpose of. 

Every year, Maddy and I would have a birthday cake that was absolutely bristling with candy corn on it. Other than that, it held some exercise items, purposefully meant to be opened before the candy I'm sure. So I guess I should mention, that I am practicing the piano, and really having fun doing it. I am still an amateur, but the others in the apartment got me set up with how to count notes, and where middle c is and the circle of fifths, and I am sure that they are absolutely regretting it by now. I begged some music off of Loren, and after the few Elders who played piano before played with it for a while, I made a copy and began to work at it. I don't know any scales, and my hands still refuse to work individually, but maybe sometime I'll be able to play a hymn for you guys. 

Luckily, despite the quarantine I am able to go to the church to get practice in. The reason for this is because Elder Leatherwood is the Pathways specialist for BYU for the Texas Fort Worth Mission and has a lot of computer work to do every evening. This is fine with me as I get to do some missionary work online and then break off to get an hour of practice in on the piano. After that, though, we have to thoroughly disinfect everything we touched in the building, so I get to wipe down the piano. I have the first two sheets of the music (I am not good enough to play any further) folded into my pack and lovingly written and scribbled on and wrinkled and bent. Speaking of my pack, despite having the smallest and lightest pack in my group, I can confidently say that I fit the most stuff into it. 

I will include pictures below, but just like when I worked at scout camp, I run my pack like a drill sergeant and make sure I am equipped for any scenario and never allow any resource to run low. 

Actually, I am a little low on band-aids due to having cut myself with my pocket knife around four times while trying to fix a cool looking pen that was abandoned by an old river. On a related note, I now have a lovely collection of golf balls, some valuing at about twelve dollars apiece! 

But that's besides the point. General conference was great, I made crepes on Saturday, while Elder Leatherwood made sticky buns on Sunday. We went to the church to watch it because the internet connection on our phones stink. Unlike as when I was home, conference went by way too quickly. Each talk seemed five minutes, with not enough spiritual info. But it was still very satisfying and spiritual. My personal favorite talk was Elder Stevenson's talk about trials, and their benefits. Actually, several talks were on that subject, so maybe they are onto something. This morning was P-day and so since no one was using some old bananas I made banana bread.

As I write this I am eating it and it is possibly the best thing I have made while out here. Translation, I haven't exactly been the best cook on the mission. Every dish I make I realize how much I was spoiled by and how much I miss Mom and Lindsay. I tried to make biscuits the other day and I'm pretty sure I activated the other guyses "member meal you need to eat this" instinct. But this bread is pretty good. That pretty much wraps up my week. We were fed every evening, (the Ganschow's gave us pasta with a spicy sauce that I'm pretty sure was for me) and with the issue of not being present for the meals, the members have taken to giving us dessert uncooked. We've got bags and bags of cookie dough balls that the other Elder's simply eat like popcorn while I try to cook them. Well, I guess that's about it. We have outside time, so we will try to go to a park this afternoon. We just have to have a mile radius between us and every other human so we will see how that goes. 

I guess I will see all of you later, some sooner, some later, some don't want me to see them, and some really want me to see them, but all in due time. With love, 

  Elder Peck.