Happy New Year!

Hello family! I hope you all have had a great week, things over here have been pretty busy. We had two Christmas parties on Tuesday and Thursday (half of the mission on one day and the other half on the other day) and on Monday we had to set everything up for it. They were way fun, we got to play sports for the first part of it, then we eat, had a white elephant gift exchange and then Santa Claus came! Elder Falcon and I were Santa´s Elves in a little skit we did for everyone. We were sitting next to Santa taking our vacations relaxing and eating ice cream when he started to think something was missing. He realized he had missed mission mendoza! So he called up his wise men (President and Elder Christensen) and they brought candy to everyone haha. It was pretty fun. I had a fake beard on and I kept pulling it down to eat the ice cream which got some good laughs. I´m loving the offices with everyone, we´ve gotten close and just have a blast with Sister Avila and President. We´re going to their house again tonight to celebrate the New Year so that should be fun as well.

Speaking of New Years celebrations, we said goodbye to 2011 and welcomed 2012 this morning by running 13 kilometers. It honestly didn´t seem that bad...until the last 3 kilometers that were all up hill. And the last kilometer was basically as steep as Mount Everest. We ran around Parque San Martin for about 10 kilometers and then headed for Cerro de la Gloria. Cerro means hill but I´m pretty sure it´s the biggest "hill" I´ve ever seen in my life. I was so absolutely dead when I got to the top but it felt great once we could breath again and look out across all of Mendoza and see where we had come from.

I think I´ve been having moments like that lately as I think of New Years goals and goals for the last half of my mission. It´s been cool to look back and read what I wrote last year at this time and realize where I´ve come from and the progress I´ve made. I think a lot of what I wanted to accomplish this year I´ve done to a certain extent but there´s still a lot more I could work on. So a lot of my goals for this year are to continue progressing on the ones I put at the beginning of last year. There´s a couple new ones and they have different focuses but for the most part they´re pretty similar. What kinda New Years goals do you all have?!? You better have some good ones because you´re not going to get anyone if you don´t know where you want to go.

We haven´t had a ton of success this week with teaching people, it seems like no one is home. A couple of our investigators are really busy with work so it´s been kind of a long week because we haven´t been able to teach any of them. Hopefully after the new year things will start calming down a little and we´ll be able to find people more often. We did find some really cool people last night when we were out so we´ll have to see what comes from them. It´s a bummer because a new year is such a perfect time to talk about baptism and "being born again." What better way to start off a new year than by getting baptised and literally starting a new life? But, we´re doing all we can, there´s not much we can do when our people are never home.

Welp family, It was awesome to see you guys last Sunday. I hope you all are having a wonderful time chilling and hanging out together.

With all the love a HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Elder Lounsbury