I'll tell you what I'M doing. Sweating, that's what. But it's a refined, controlled sweat these days, since I think my body is finally adjusting to extreme temperatures and is getting too lazy to sweat as much as it used to. It's just like, "Meh, whatever, here's a few drops, I'm going to sleep." And also, the leaves here in Stara Zagora are already kind of turning. Summer is . . . ending.
Some interesting things in my planner from this week (worst sentence ever, you probably all stopped reading right here):
1) Go and find some less-active members from our branch spisek, knock on the random block apartment door and have a lady open it and tells us she now attends the Evangelical Church, they speak in tongues there and she likes it better, goodbye. About 3/4 of the registered members on our klon spisek (branch directory! oooh words!) are inactive/disappeared/sometimes dead. So it's sometimes interesting/amusing to go find them.
2) Deliver vegetables from a member's celo to another member's house, who is currently having really bad back/money problems, and give her a massage for an hour while her children play on the floor! I never thought massage skills would be so useful here on "the mish." But they are. Almost . . . every day. And I've gone back to do similar massages a few times since then.
3) Go to a lesson with recent convert Tanya (remember her???) and accidentally ask her if her husband, Peter, was alive. I phrased it this way: "And Peter, alive is?" But I meant to say healthy!! I really did!! Because he used to be sick!! It's just that there's this expression here that everyone says as they leave or say goodbye: "Da budesh zhiv y zdrav," or like, May you be alive and well, basically. So the words "healthy" and "alive" just got a little too mixed up in my mind, I suppose? Oh well. Tanya laughed and laughed for like 30 years, so it was worth it.
4) Pluck eyebrows. This is crucial, since it is altogether too hot to wear my bangs, and the ol' forehead is what makes an impression on people.
5) Go to the copier place and make a million copies of our English class flyer, since this is the week we advertise for such classes. Hand them out for hours on the glav, saying, "Zapovyadaite," which is like this word that means, "Here you go," or "Come in," or "Eat this tiny cookie, please," depending on context.
6) Two dinner appointments! What? That has never happened. People don't really "feed" us here, unless it's like soda and weird biscuits. The first was with Raiko, the old guy who is an artist and probably an agnostic and also, this week, kept complimenting me on my new dress (thrift store!!) and gave me and Sister Turnbow these awesome old pictures of him as a young communist man. The second was with Nikolai, a youngish investigator of the Elders', and his parents, with whom he lives, in their awesome courtyard patio outdoory house. Shopska. Make it, everybody.
We are continuing to find investigators and it's pretty slow, especially since people keep going in and out of town for summer and moving away and whatnot. But we're excited about a few people and especially excited about being able to hopefully build up the branch here. But anyway.
I love you guys. Read Alma 34 if you get a chance. Okay?
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