#ET #PHONEHOME

Whaaat is my liiiifeee right now. You know in movies where you see the two main characters in a The-Struggle-Is-Real moment, and then one of them says: “Well, at least it can’t get any worse :)..”

DUNN DUNN DUNNNNNNN

Actually, it can.

On Thursday morning last week I woke up with a killer headache and some nausea, which only served as a precurser to the biggest surprise of my mission. At 7:30am after morning exercises, President Lewis calls to tell me that he is going to “alter the course of my day a little bit,” that I need to pack my bags, that the APs were coming to pick me up in 3 hours, and that I was moving 3 hours north to Chelan to trade places with a new missionary who needed an Emergency Transfer to an area closer the mission home. My area, in Moxee, to be exact. Waahhhh. So I scribbled out notes to all the people I wouldn’t actually be able to say goodbye to, hurriedly shoved all my earthly possessions into my decrepit luggage, and at noon, the APs and I set sail for Chelan. (Which I would like to say was the most awkward car ride of my life, alone with the APs without a companion. Plus I was experiencing some unprecedented I’m-Gonna-Barf car sickness, and they kept trying to get me to eat food from the MASSIVE pile of “provisions” on the back seat – AKA cookies and sweets.)

So anyway, there were a couple other changes being made to Chelan that day, so we picked up another sister in Moses Lake, and the moseyed our way up to Chelan. We passed through Ephrata which was the best moment of my life, being able to see my old stomping ground again, but I thought I was going to die later as we were wending our way through the switch-backs of Chelan on the way to meet my new companion. I seriously had a high fever and chills at the same time, which is weird because I -never- get car sick. After 5 hours of driving, when we stopped the car at the church building, I was able to walk about 6 feet away from the car before I threw up for all I was worth. All. Over. My. Feet. I was so weak, I couldn’t think, so Sister Blackmer (the one we picked up in Moses Lake) helped me shuffle into the church building where I she literally cleaned my feet and legs, then we got back in the car like nothing happened. After we got out 10 minutes later at the purple Victorian mansion which is now my home and hugged my companion, I shuffled off to a huge brush pile to throw up for my life again. Poor Sister Blackmer is such a trooper. She held my hair back, and helped me sit on a boulder. The APs gave me a blessing, I went inside the house and spent about 30 minutes on the floor by the toilet, my companion made my bed, I spent my entire first night in Chelan throwing up into a trash can, sick with the flu that Sister Averett and I both caught down in Moxee.

Weekly planning was shot, because we were both trying to recouperate from our respective illnesses – Hermana Capi with some kind of bronchial infection, and me with the flu. It wasn’t until Friday night that I was well enough to even start unpacking. Or shower. Gross.

Halloween was super lame, because we had to try and do our weekly planning, which we’d missed on account of being sick. So we went ahead and did our best on that, got some service in for a recent convert named Christal (helping her do her Halloween hair and make-up), went to a dinner where we had shrimp gumbo with spicy sausage, and then came home to watch movies, paint nails, and spend some time actually getting to know each other now that neither one of us was fighting to stay alive.

Later that night at 12am, however, Hermana Capi woke me up. She’d been throwing up and wanted to know what to do to make the nausea go away. My super exhausted/disoriented answer: “Well, Hermana, did you think to pray?” Her response was no, but she wasn’t really thinking about that while haunched over the toilet while her body tried to put itself inside out. I gave her the useful advice to sleep sitting up, and then went back into my sleep oblivion. Poor girl spent the rest of the night throwing up and crying while I just stayed in bed. Which I guess is karma for her making fun of my throw up sounds the day before, and telling me she wished she’d recorded my throwing up fun times so we could laugh at them together :p

So on account of the new bought of flu virus, we spent Sunday inside, missed the confirmation of our recent convert, and both tried to keep all our food and water on the inside.

It’s been an interesting week, to say the least. The irony is that Hermana Capi and I are dying together on December 18th, and this week we literally died together. We’re both up and running again, though! 🙂 So that’s good. Hermana Capi is awesome, and we’ve got some super solid plans. I can’t say I have a very good grasp on anything at this point (having not met pretty much anyone in the ward or our investigators) but I trust that Hermana Capi knows what’s up and we’ll have some awesome miracles to report on next week. 
Chelan is absolutely gorgeous. It’s all mountains and clouds and when it’s gray and there’s the smoke-like clouds all over the mountains, I really honestly feel that at any moment the characters from Twilight are going to emerge from the woods. It’s really eerie at night though. We live in this huge purple Victorian mansion off the shore of Wapato lake (slightly smaller than Lake Chelan) and although it’s been completely renovated like something chic off of HGTV, it’s got this haunted vibe that chills the soul. It’s really cool here all the time, and I love the vibes of this place. I finally feel like I’m in Washington!

​Meet Hermana Taua, from Honolulu, Hawaii! Her many talents include: singing, playing the piano, figuring out how to make steamed rice in the microwave, and bearing an awesome testimony with everyone we meet.

​And here’s a selfie of hermana capi and me like 5 minutes before we came to write 🙂 She’s way chill. Reminds me of an old homie of mine, Aimee. It’s awesome to be able to kick it with such a swagtastic companion (not that Hermana Taua was without swag.)