July 24, 2011 -email

Dear FAM!

Mina genki desu ka?

Oh wow. This week... Well, Monday is our P-day from now on. We just found out last week that we were switching. So from now on, I’ll be writing to you on Mondays unless we go to the temple and then it will be Tuesday. (Not next week, but the next week, August 2^nd I think we are going to the temple. But you’ll be on the hike then right?)

Oh the HIKE!!! I’m kind of excited to know that for my birthday some of my very favorite people will be in one of my very favorite places. If you happen to be at Hidden Lake on my birthday, go find that old dead tree and carve my name on it will you? The one I’ve carved my name on 2 times already... anyone remember where it is? Probably not. : )　I think Anne Holliday would probably be able to find it.

Well, Kurowawa has sort of dropped us. We had a dinner appointment scheduled for last Wednesday evening with her at a member’s house and she didn’t show up. Granted, that was the day of the "typhoon" (which just amounted to various spurts of heavy rain throughout the day), but she hasn’t contacted us since then either. We usually meet her at a park at 5:00 if the weather is good, so the next day we went to the park, but she wasn’t there. I thought maybe she was avoiding us. The next day we went again and didn’t see her. We ran into some members though and started talking to them. While we were talking, I spotted Kurosawa walking on the sidewalk outside the park. It was pretty far away, but I could tell it was her and I thought I had seen her glance our direction but she just kept walking. So we said bye to the members and darted through the park towards an exit that was in the direction she was going. When we got there, we looked down the sidewalk in the direction she had been going but she wasn’t there... then we looked the other direction, the direction she had come from, and there she was walking back. I’m pretty sure she had seen us and turned around. We followed her from a distance to see if she might go back into the park but she just headed back to her apartment... I felt like a stalker and a fool. Good times. We are going to try to go find her one more time this week, but I don’t think it will go anywhere.

Tomorrow we are getting laptops! (The exclamation point is more out of surprise than excitement.) President Albrecht has been trying to get them approved for about 2 years now and apparently the Quorum of the 12 finally said yes, we could try them. So Tokyo mission is the guinea pig... they are going to see if it helps the work or not. They will be especially useful for our elders because men here go to work early in the morning before we are out proselyting and don’t come back until after 10pm usually.

Ok, sorry gotta run - I hope we can come back later to finish writing but we need to head right now... sorry if we don’t make it back!!!

I love you all!!!

-Waite Shimai