Attack of the bed bugs
February 9th, 2010
Hey everyone, welcome back, and thanks for taking a few minutes of your time to read the latest updates from the life of Elder Hamish Macpherson, here in Tracy California (really, just a hop, skip, and a jump from Sacramento… kind of). Well, here goes…
So, I’m loving life down here. We’ve had a lot of success in the last week. Right now we have 3 people working towards a baptismal date! It’s really exciting. Ed, who I mentioned last week, Brianna, and also Jaivon. All of them are preparing for baptism within the next month. We’re also teaching another guy named Michael; his wife’s family is really big in the church (in fact, one of her relatives is in the 1st Quorum of the Seventy) and so he’s had lots of exposure, but never expressed interest… until now, and he too will hopefully have a baptismal date set soon! It’s an exciting time here in the Tracy Ward, and I think the ward is feeling it.
I’m still borrowing a bike from Elder McNeill, and getting through the rainy season here, which so far hasn’t been too bad… I think it’s almost over. Speaking of seasons, I’ve now been out for 1 year now! Can you all believe it? Just one more to go, and they say it goes even faster than this last one…
We had a great Zone Conference last week. Brother Gary Heaton, the Executive director of the MTC, came to visit and we had a great group teaching session with him. It was really inspiring. The Mission as a whole is doing great too. We had 89 baptisms in January, the highest in over four years! We fasted yesterday so we could continue to see those miracles and blessings.
Not everything here is peachy perfect however. I woke up a few days ago with some suspicious itching bites on my leg… and then more today. So I investigated. Now if you’ll recall, we live in a new apartment here in Tracy, which they moved into for a few reasons (one of which was bed bugs), and everything has been fine… until now. So, armed with a flashlight I began to thoroughly scan my bed, sheets, pillows, etc. I found nothing, at first. But then I looked in the cracks/crevices of the old wooden bunkbed we sleep on… Jackpot! There they were… hiding in the dark corners, and boy are they gross! I only found a few, but that’s all it takes. Well, we had some insectecide in one of the cupboards (I know, convenient, eh?), so I mixed a solution into water, put it in a spray bottle, threw all my sheets/bedding/etc. in the wash, and then just went to town, spraying every inch of that bed! Now I just have to pray that takes care of it. *sigh* — the worst is that I got bitten just above my eyelid lastnight, so now I have this annoying red spot there, well, I’ll survive.
So there’s a lot of good, and a little bad, but all in all, I’ll make it through… one more year to go!