Freestyle Email and a "Weed" Tie (Week #12)

I hope you caught my note about wildlife in the last email post because it will make you appreciate this photo (one of the two we received this week):

A possum we found while mowing the lawn

I made him promise, when he left, that he would send me at least one photo each week when he emailed. He has been true to his word, but so far, there have been spiders, crabs, zoo animals, and now this poor little critter. There have thankfully also been some photos of human life, but I must admit all of the animal pictures make me that much more thankful for a friendly human face from time to time.

I expect Elder Hess's emails to come in sometime just before noon on Mondays. That's been the trend so far. This week, I checked email at about 6:50am, and he'd already been there and gone....I thought I had a few hours of uninterrupted time in the morning to get a good email and the "photos of the week" off to him before he wrote, but I failed. He'd written to the kids (who had written on Sunday) at 6:11am. I missed the boat.

Typically his emails are just answers to my questions, but this time, there were no questions to answer. It's nice to see that he can freehand a letter once in awhile and actually share the things that are most important to him, so maybe it's a good thing I failed.

Here are the most important happenings of mission week #12 in the eyes of Elder Gannon Hess:


Ok! I have to write early today because it's Elder P's last pday and he has stuff to do! So I'm freestyling this email!

This week I got sick. Like couldn't sleep one night and threw up 3 times kinda sick..While i was in the trio..So i kept working but people kept wanting to feed us. Freakin nice people...The last time I threw up was after a member gave me chili's to help me...so I puked in their yard. 

"My weed tie"

Anyways I'm mostly better now. This was Elder P's last week and so we've been going by and saying goodbye to a lot of people. He gave me a tie (a tradition) that I had made fun of him for. He loves it cause it has flowers on it but they look like weed flowers...So he gave it to me for that and because I'm from Oregon...It's like a 200 dollar tie..

S promised to come to church for yesterday! But his ride flaked and so we had to go pick him up right after sacrament meeting. I had to lead him around while he hung onto my shoulder. It was a super cool experience. 

I also taught him the word of wisdom and he said he would quit coffee on monday but he didn't drink any yesterday!! Nobody does that!! He's so great.

Right now I'm in the mission office in McAllen for Elder P's exit interview. Apparently that's basically where the president tells you to get married and talks plans with you. I hope things change on my mission cause there's no way I'm ready for that right now. 

But today we're going to go "dig" for ties in bodega's (like ghetto Goodwill. Reminds me of the mailroom on "Elf" mixed with the garbage compactor on "Monster's Inc.")  and apparently there's some really nice ones. We're also going to play some soccer and say bye to some of Elder P's members.

Hope you had a great week!

Love you,

Elder Hess