Apartment Shopping

Malo Soifua!!!

This week was pretty fun. And by pretty fun I mean really long and really tiring. Not because we were super busy every single day, mind you, but because of the exact opposite. We had only about seven lessons this week, which is not very many in case you didn't know, and we spent a lot of time trying to find new people. We had a few really long/slow days, but we pushed through, and we were able to see some success for our work (#IslandGrind).

The highlight of our week was probably when Elder Kelley and I went shopping for apartments on Wednesday. The house/apartment we're currently living in being sold, and they're going to close pretty soon. As a result of this, the Housing Coordinators in our mission and the Assistants to the President (APs) have been working on trying to find a new place of residency for us to move into. Normally, the Housing Coordinators, Elder and Sis Spanos, would go and view all of the prospects for new housing. The only problem is that they are currently serving in the NYC Mission remotely. They are still living in their home in Ogden, Utah. As a result of this, the APs messaged Elder Kelley and me and asked us to go view the apartments ourselves!

So there we were, walking into a very nice apartment complex on the North Shore of the Island, and we stopped to admire all of the wonders of modern architecture. A leasing agent met us there, and she showed us a few different apartment options that were up for sale. We settled on a "larger one-bed plan", but we didn't officially agree to buy it. We still had another appointment a few miles away for another housing option. We drove down there, met the realtor at the front door, and she showed us around the apartment. She also showed us a video of a third option, and she described a fourth one that would be hitting the market in a few days. With all of these options and pictures and questions, Elder Kelley and I went back to our car and discussed our findings for about half an hour before making a formal report to our APs and our housing broker who works with the mission.

If all goes well, we should be moving in a week or two, I believe. And if we get the apartment that Elder Kelley and I like the most, we should be getting a dishwasher and a washer and dryer!! I never realized just how nice it is to have those amenities until I had to hand wash all of the dishes and take all of our dirty clothes to a laundromat on P-Days.

Other than that, my week was pretty uneventful. We had a fun little temple devo here in the Brooklyn Stake. The Sake president and Pres Teuscher both spoke, and we watched a virtual tour of the Rome temple with Elders Bednar and Rasband. It was really cool, and the Rome temple is really beautiful. But yeah, the work goes forward. Elder Kelley and I are kind of revamping our pool, and I'm excited to see where life takes us. #IslandGind #FloodStaten #StatenZone

Alofa tele lava atu ia outou,

Elder Hill

Photos:

• A really cool drawing someone made of the covenant path. The gates are baptism, the rod is the Iron Rod, the temple is the temple (duh), and the tree is the Tree of Life. There's all kinds of cool stuff you can pull or learn from this pic, and I encourage you all to discuss it with people and see how much you can pull from it.
• I made more pizza 
• I found some lettuce shipped from AZ at the food pantry, so that made me happy
• Elder Kelley made some bomb ceviche last night with some skate-wing fillets we got from Wendy (stingray meat)
• Ceviche during the temple devo