Elder Davis in Ohio

  Hello, everyone. This line is from Bill Murray's Bob Wiley in  What About Bob?  I'm experiencing a lot of feelings, and I'll probably be experiencing more of them in this last week. The largest one is actually just stress--there were a lot of things that we wanted to do, and it never seems like there's enough time for us to get them done. We've sort of been working overtime, even. It's just crazy. With the Light the World campaign beginning tomorrow, we've got a lot going on. We've assigned missionaries to do challenges several days in advance and make some content about it so we can post it to social media the day of the challenge. Hopefully it will be pretty cool. It's a lot of coordination and a lot of trust in the missionaries. We might have wanted to give them an earlier deadline than the one we gave--missionaries have a lot on their minds and on their plates, so it's easy to forget. Anyway, then we've got our Hear Him series that we...

Hey, everyone. This week's quote is from Don Knotts' Barney Fife in an episode of  The Andy Griffith Show . I don't know the name, but the episode's about a spoiled boy who's illegally riding his bike on sidewalks and such. I'm sure it's not really a new theme to all of you by now, but HOLY cow the days and weeks are going by quickly. This last week was a blur. It feels like I don't even know what happened, but I'll recount what I can remember. So first we finally got out of some of our social isolation and had the opportunity to do indoor service opportunities again, so we went to the St. Vincent de Paul kitchen at Sts. Cyril and Methodius Church again on Thursday after having been away for a couple weeks. I guess the other elders hadn't really gotten in touch with Margaret, the woman who runs the kitchen, because she was like, "What happened?" So we explained that we had been put in a lockdown, but we were back now to help. It was a p...

Hey, everyone! Golly, I'm tired. The quote is from Helen and Hogarth Hughes from  The Iron Giant . Hogarth had just spent all night finding the giant a place to lay low (Dean's scrapyard), and crawls through his second-story bedroom window as the sun is rising, stumbles onto the ground, gets up, kicks off his shoes and pulls up his covers to get into bed when his mom opens his door and they have this exchange. That's how I feel right now. I'm just beat. Elder Washburn and I have been slowly getting over whatever it is we contracted. It's one of those colds that just hangs on for a really long time. You know the type that, like, getting back to normal is so gradual that there's no real definitive point where you're like, "Ah, yes. I'm all better now." I'm still just slowly getting uncongested. I'm at the point where I'm starting to be able to taste flavors again, so that's pretty awesome. I was worried for a bit there: I wondered...

Hello, everyone! This week has been pretty good. The quote is from two people: the first is Casey Affleck, but I don't remember the name of his character. The second is from his brother in the movie, and I can't remember the name of the actor or the character. But anyway, it's the "Mormon twins" from the Ocean's movies, specifically  Ocean's 13 . In the scene they're posing as employees of Willy Bank's new casino-hotel, and they're kicking out a reviewer that they gave a disease to so he gives a bad review to Bank's hotel. Anyway, all that is to say that I've caught something. It doesn't seem like it's COVID--I just have aches, soreness and a wet cough. No fever that I've detected. We think we know where we got it--we visited some members who said they had been sick recently, but not with COVID, so that's my best guess. Elder Washburn has it, too, but it seems like it's not hitting him quite as hard as it's hitti...

Hey, everyone. The quote for this week is from Harrison Ford's Linus Larrabee in  Sabrina . SOOO a lot has been happening over the past few days with social media. We've been  pretty  occupied. We've had a lot of meetings and discussions about different aspects of social media work with different people. So on transfer day we drove down to Columbus for a meeting after transfers with all the social media specialists. We took the zone leaders with us--we felt like it would be more efficient and effective if we just carpooled--and went on down. While we were there I saw some missionaries I hadn't seen for a while, like Elder Tyson Jones and Elder Christian Lambert, my MTC companion. It was a fun time. Then Elder Timothy and his new companion, Elder Pratt, led a meeting for all the missionaries in social media roles (and some zone-level leadership, too) that we helped out with. We basically talked about the restructuring that we've been doing. Not to bore you with detai...

  Hey, everyone! This week's quote is from Wheatley (played by Setphen Merchant) in  Portal 2 , which is a video game, so I'm sorry for veering from movies for a moment. This is the best I could recall for this week. So I've found my final resting place: Youngstown. Here is where I will die. Elder Washburn will be killing me off, and I will return to my heavenly home. Lest any of you panic upon reading those sentences, I will tell you that those are terms missionaries use to describe a missionary who is returning home. I'm also partial to "going to that great Transfer in the sky," which is one I came up with. I thought it was an appropriate season to be a little bit morbid. All this is to say that transfer news says Elder Washburn and I are staying here for my last transfer. I will finish off my mission as a social media specialist, and hopefully the work we will do will be able to benefit the people in this area and most of all the missionaries. We've bee...