Elder Nicholas Berrett is currently serving in the Billings Montana mission (serving most of Montana and a good portion of Wyoming) for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. He is excited to serve the Lord and the people of Montana and Wyoming for the next two years!

Monday, March 20, 2017

Voice Recording 3/20 part 1

Good morning!  Hey, I got it to work!  This is Elder Berrett, signing in, on where am I, Helena KTS 500, No, I’m not even going to.  No. Stopping right there.  Good morning mom, today I’m actually going to make that Alton Brown pancake mix, I’m pretty excited.  I went to the store last Monday and bought everything I need.  Baking powder… crap.  I guess I need baking powder too, but I, oh! I have it right here.  Ok, so I have baking powder, baking soda, flour, buttermilk, all they had was low fat so I hope it’s all good. And sugar, oh, yeah I have some downstairs, perfect.  And then… crap. Butter.  Okay good I have some.  Two eggs, separated.  A whole stick of butter for greasing the pan?!?! I’m not going to use a whole stick of butter.  Maybe I’m reading this wrong.  You’re probably wincing as I’m doing this.  I’m going to pause this recording while I go downstairs to get some sugar. 

Howdy!  I’m back! Alright, let’s see, what do we need to do here first?  “Combine all the ingredients in a lidded container, shake to mix.”  I think I’m just going to mix it in a bowl because I’m using it today.  I’m not making a bunch right now. I really (unintelligible) Mondays.  And, yeah, bowls are a little easier to clean than lidded containers I feel like.  Ok, let’s see.  Except I don’t know how much to make! How much does that all make? 6 cups, wow!  I might as well make it in a lidded container, this is going to be a lot.  I hope I have enough buttermilk, how much buttermilk do I need?  2 cups.  How much is this? 1 quart. I could be totally wrong but I thought it was 4 quarts in a, or 4 cups in a pint and 2 pints in a quart? Anyways, I know that I will have enough in here.  Yeah, and then wasn’t it like 4 quarts in a gallon? I think? Maybe? Oh well.  I know that I have at least 2 cups in here that I’ve got to use by March 24th.  What day is it today?  Today is the 20th or 21st So I pretty much gotta use it all today.  I’m sorry, but this beginning is really boring.

How are you doing, because I’m doing wonderful. Wow, this week.  Kinda hard to believe it’s only been one week since last Monday.  That feels like ages ago. Not gonna lie, but it was super fast.  Ah, let’s see… Monday, Monday. I had a fun lesson with … Lidded container.  I don’t even know where to begin if I’m going to make that much stuff. I need a big container.  We’ve had a lot of stuff happen.  Last Monday we had a lesson with a recent convert that we have here in Helena that we’re teaching.  Tuesday we had MLC.  That was fun.  Holy cow. I really… I’m not going to use that (unintelligible) MLC was amazing as usual.  It was just fantastic, I could not get enough of it, I was so sad when it was over. Nothing much is really changing, the biggest thing is re-emphasizing no facebook friending between elders and sisters. Apparently the mission is having some problems with that-  elder/sister relationships, so we’re working on that. Trying to get that to not happen.

Oh, these look like big, bowls? Sure, why the heck not.  And then I will just pour the extra mix that I don’t use inside, I don’t know, like a whatchamacallit. Sealable bowl thing.  Anyways, I’m talking as I’m working.  MLC was fantastic, wonderful, I loved seeing President and Sister Wadsworth.  Sister Wadsworth even brought us all dessert for MLC and she brought pizza, we were shocked. Well, it wasn’t too shocking since that’s what we have every MLC and it’s tradition, but she’s normally very “Watch what you eat everyone.” And so we teased her a bit about that.  We’re like “Sister Wadsworth, you brought us all these brownies and frosted cookies! What’s gotten into you?” Tons of fun there.

Let’s see, Wednesday, not much happened that day.  We planned for zone training, no, no we didn’t do that Wednesday, that was Thursday.  Crap. I don’t know what we did Wednesday, I’d have to look in my area book, and I’m mixing flour right now.  How many should this make? It doesn’t say.  Oh well!  I’ll find out.  Six cups of flour.  One of the days we had a ginormous, basically from like 12:00 to 4:30, we had a weekly planning, zone training planning, writing the reports for the Boulder branch history, that the sister in charge of branch history asked us to do.  It was really, really unproductive missionary work-wise, it was just kinda stuff that we needed to do, sitting down, in a church… I was ready to blow my brains out.  But it was productive.  And then I was ultra-happy and excited to go do missionary work when we got to.  It was kinda like being sick, and then finally getting to go out and do missionary work, it was the greatest thing ever, just on a smaller, more productive scale.

Wow.  I’m tired.  I slept really well last night.  (drawers opening and closing) Where’s all the measuring cups?  I don’t know where anything is in this house.  That was wonderful.  We went to Boulder, oh, (laughs) you’ll find this funny- so normally we’ve been staying at this family’s house when we go to Boulder.  They’re just snowbirds, travel all over in their RV, go to various places.  Like they stayed in Yuma for awhile.  But we’ve been staying in their house.  We were house sitting with this other guy that they asked to house sit there, he’s a member.  And it’s really great.  We slept in the basement on couches, had some water problems there, and some mice problems, and bug problems… that apparently they didn’t know anything about. And they just got back this week, and they’re like, “Well, we’d love for you to stay with us, but we kinda want  to clean everything up, and get this whole water thing fixed. We’ve got a water line that broke and so we would have water in like 3 minute bursts, and so we didn’t have a place to stay last night. Or Friday night.  We asked around, and the branch president asked around, and we have a place now, but that one day we didn’t, so we slept at the church. (laughs) It was like camping, only, yeah.  It was fun.  It was a bit of a fun campout.  Everyone’s like “Oh, that’s so awful!”  And I’m like “No, it was an adventure.”  I mean, yeah I would never want to do it again, my back’s still a little sore from it, but you know, you lay out your mat, my companion had a sleeping bag, I got that big blue blanket you sent me, and Nina’s TARDIS blanket, a big pillow and just curled up next to the Relief Society heater, it was great.  I actually really enjoyed myself.  And then we went and used a members shower and he made us breakfast and it was great.  That was tons of fun.

Sorry, I’m still trying to figure out where all the measuring cups might be.  Like, I could eyeball it, but this is kinda baking, and you’re not supposed to do that with baking. (yawns)  Let’s see, tons of stuff happened this week, but I can’t think of anything right now, while I’m sitting up here in the kitchen.  Zone training. That was super fun.  We had that Friday morning.  It was pretty spiritual, I went  up there to give a discussion, I had all these notes planned and then as I was starting it, it just didn’t feel right, and the spirit just pretty much lead me to do another discussion. Not necessarily another discussion, same topic, Preach My Gospel chapter 10- Becoming Better Teachers, but just doing it in a way different way.  It was really powerful and really good.  And kinda lead in perfectly to my companion’s role play.  Where previously I was like “How am I going to do this?”  Liquid smoke?? Hmm. Other than that, it was no, not “other than that”, the whole day was great.  Let’s see. 
Friday also we gave a pretty miraculous blessing to someone.  She’s never been too religious before, she’s going through a lot of family troubles right now, and she has a co-worker at work who’s a member, and asked her if she would like a blessing, Kinda explained to her a little what it was, and she said “absolutely.”  So she came to the church, and we taught her about it, explained to her the process, how it’s done by the priesthood, what the priesthood is…  It really brought her a lot of peace and comfort.  She really enjoyed it.  And I was just thankful to be a part of it.  She was in tears by the end.  We were able to talk to her about the Book of Mormon, shared a scripture from it, and promised that she’d find that same peace that she felt from her blessing in it.  We’re following up with her soon, so really excited to see where that goes.  She lives in our area.  The member doesn’t, she lives in 6th ward, but her friend lives in East Helena, our area.  So I’ll tell you how that goes next week.  I’m really excited to follow up with that.  It’s been awhile since I’ve really sat down and taught someone like that, I don’t know.  

We’ve been really trying to find, like we have some investigators, but they’re not really progressing, apart from Andy and Ralph in Boulder.  I’ll tell you about that in the next voice mail. They are, wow, I hope they continue to progress and that things continue to go well for them.  We’re trying to find right now.  We’re really praying that we will find some more work.  It’s been a bit of a struggle.  We have some less actives that are starting to progress, but as far as investigators go, not too many, especially here in Boulder.  We’re really hoping to find some.  We were finding some, but they just haven’t been panning out.  We’re really praying to focus on that as a mission.  So, hope all goes well.  I’m excited to see all that’s going to happen this next week.  

We have Zone Conference on Tuesday and the assistants aren’t going to make it, cause of all the zone conferences they have to go to every transfer, and zone conference is where we have multiple zones gather together, we’re having Bozeman and Butte come here this transfer, and since the assistants aren’t coming and we’re the host zone, we were asked to give the assistants discussions which are both 30 minute discussions on a chapter in Preach My Gospel.  And I’m actually a little stressed out about it.  I have some ideas of what I want to speak on, but not for 30 minutes. Especially since for preparation day we were planning on going outside since the weather has been so nice.  No snow this week! All sun.  It’s been wonderful, up in like the 50’s and 60’s. I hear Arizona is up in the 90’s this week.  That sounds wonderful.  But we’re planning on going outside and playing ultimate Frisbee, but I won’t be able to play too much, so we’ll see how that goes.  More to follow!


Love you, I’m going to send this off since this recordings now at 15 minutes. Love you, have a wonderful day, I’m going to find that measuring cup before I begin to record again because this is really bothering me.  And multitasking is hard.  

Love you! Bye!

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