Of tree stumps and Dexter shoes

This monday might have been the most fun of my entire mission. We spent most of the morning at Brother Swanson's house, just having fun with him. Brother Swanson, much like myself, is a very competitive gamer. Like his wife told us, the only good thing about him is that if you do win, you can know that it was a fair win; he doesn't even let his grandma win. We played a few games, and we didn't do so well. I only won one game. Meanwhile, he only lost one of the games that we played with him.

Afterwards, we all went out and helped him clean his deck. We painted it for a while, get it ready for entertainment now that the weather has started to dry up. It was a lot of fun just playing around, getting work done. We chatted about a lot of things; about a website that Elder Milstead was involved it, the latest TV shows, Dexter, a whole bunch of stuff. Brother Swanson joked that at the rate I was using paint, maybe I ought to start mowing the lawn instead; I had used almost half of it with the roller to paint the floorboards.  I had gone so quickly, the roller had sent flecks of paint onto my tennis shoes. We all joked that it looked like they'd been worn during some kind of shooting, with blood spots all over them.  All in all, it was a lot of fun.

Later on that day, we got another chance to help people out. We were just walking on the streets, chatting, when we saw a guy with a shovel digging a hole in his front yard.  We didn't really see what he was doing, so we walked over and tried to give him a hand.  There were branches all over the front yard, and the guy told us that he was trying to get some trees out of his front yard because they were attracting bees.  He seemed kind of doubtful when we said we wanted to help him out. And why not? Here he is, and two guys in suits come up and ask to help him dig in his yard. He handed us a spare shovel, and we went to work anyway. It was a lot more satisfying than I thought it would be to just get down and dirty with a tree. The only problem came when we found out that one of the tree's root systems was tangled with his main water pipe. We got it out anyway. It's a lot of fun to help people out. I hope we're able to do more of it. After all, like Mosiah says, "When ye are in the service of your fellow man, ye are only in the service of your God."