Week 62

Well, it feels like it wasn't that long ago that i was sitting here emailing you guys last week. haha probably because we took our p-day halfway through the week! It was a pretty messed up week. haha i guess i'll just go through the 4 days that have happened since i have talked to you last.

1. Thursday: we had trade offs with the assistants. They came down wednesday night and stayed until friday morning. I went with Elder White. he just got called as assistant this transfer and the poor soul is dying this transfer so he has to spend his last T in the office! haha he's pretty sad about it, but he's awesome. He served in ginninderra for a long time so we went and visited a lot of people he used to work with. and one of his recent converts. We did a lot of walking around talking to people and i got sunburned! haha except it's not like the good utah sun. it just gets red and irritated and hurts and now i'm still just white as ever. haha but we were able to see Yang Bai because elder white used to meet with her a lot so somehow she found some time to meet with us. it was great. and now we're meeting with her on wednesday and she wants to help me learn chinese and we'll read the book of mormon together.

2. Friday: We did Zone training meeting and because the assistants were there and we had MLC on tuesday and p-day on wednesday we didn't have any time to really prepare a good training so we both winged it. hahaha it went really good though. President has asked that we use the sister training leaders in our trainings for zone training meeting so we told them they could have 20 minutes to present a training for the zone.... 40 minutes later they still had another activity they wanted to do and we had to just stand up and thank them for their training and start ours... not sure if they were very happy about that... Then me and elder Katene tried to make a pasta bake for lunch, but i think something went wrong because we both felt terrible for the rest of the day. We had a lesson with Jimmy that night at one of our members homes. It went really well and it was good to have him there to make good friendships. We talked about the 18th for baptism and he told us he wants some more time to understand the gospel more before he gets baptized, so that's off for the moment. I have no doubt that he will get baptized at some point. i just hope i get to be there to see it. we'll see. keep praying for him!

3. Saturday: We had general conference pretty much all day. It was hectic. Robbins' talk was smash in the morning session. and President Uchtdorf had one of the best conference talks i've ever heard in the priesthood session. It was inspiring. all of conference was good, but i thought saturday was especially good. We met with wilma between sessions to read the book of mormon, and i think she really liked 1 Nephi 3:7. hopefully when we explained it to her it helped her understand that scriptures are meant to be applied to our lives. not just enjoyed as good literature.

4. Sunday: My birthday! haha It was a great day. I didn't get to open my birthday package, but its okay because i'll probably get it this week when president comes down for interviews. So thank you in advance! haha and thank you for the white shirts and ANU shirt! i'll take a picture in it and send it next time. The other elders bought me a hot pot, which was really nice of them, but i think it will come back around when the end of the month comes and there's no money for food... ahaha it was really good, though. We had a good time. Conference was awesome, too. and there was a chinese translation set up in the primary room so me and elder Bowcut went and watched the last session in chinese! haha mostly it just made me realize how bad my chinese really  is, but it was good. i understood most of elder Richard G. Scott's talk. nice and simple, but powerful. Can't believe i only have one more conference left as a missionary! its crazy! Next october conference i'll be watching on our nice leather couches that have claw marks all over them from the cat that used to live there.....ahhahaahaha jk :) oh yeah！also, there's a returned missionary in the other ward and we were talking after one of the sessions and someone xcame up and talked to him and set up for him to go on a visit or something, and he pulled out a returned missionary daily planner and wrote it in! hahaha i was dying！ i can't waiit to have one of those for when I get home! haha

have a wonderful week! go read over some of the conference talks! they're so awesome! Due to some obedience problems in our mission, the policy for music has changed to MoTab only so i'll probably be listening to a lot of conference talks from now on. it's gonna be good. I'm so happy we have living prophets so we aren't "tossed to and fro with every wind of doctrine" because i've seen too many people that are. I hope we never take that blessing for granted. Love you all！ talk to you next week!

-Elder Tingey

this is Floriad. that flower exposition thing that canberra does every year. it wasn't very cool, and it was almost 95% women there, but me and elder Katene had a good time.

me and my companion at Mt. Ainslie, overlooking our kingdom.

Australia's tomb of the unknown soldier.... but they didn't copy america...

our birthday celebration. 火锅！