"…last thing she said was 'I'm so excited for my baptism!' " (Sam)

Hello! Good to hear from you. Thanks for always trying to send me the emails before I get on. I know its weird with my P-day on saturday but fyi I´ve received them in time every week so we´re good.

I cut my hear like right after I sent the last SD card.. hah so all the pictures you saw were before my hair cut. Its nice and short now.

After I emailed last week I remembered other things that I hadn´t told you about.. so this week you´re gonna a two week mix. :D

This week has been good. The normal people that we visit have been gone or busy this week so the few lessons that we usually teach are even fewer this week. Its alright. We have found (and preach my gospel says) that daily contact, even a phone call, text, or a little note will help maintain trust and a good relationship with investigators and members. We have very little time to proselyte but if (and when) we use it right, we see the fruits. For example, S and A  that were baptized. ALSO, an incredible woman from Iran that the Elders here in Fuengirola found. She´s from Iran, speaks persian and a little bit of english, has been studying Christianity for 12 years, moved to spain like 2 months ago, found the elders and immediately started coming to church and IS BEING BAPTIZED TOMORROW. Incredible. 

She is soo couragous and so so ready. I KNOW she has been prepared and desired to follow God´s plan before she came to earth. She just believes! Her name is G and president Deere is baptizing her. We started working with her a few  weeks ago because she doesn´t speak spanish and has been attending our branch for the last while. Plus she just knows people in our english branch and the members have really brought her in. She´s unreal. 

We´re excited and yesterday we met with her and the last thing she said was

 "I´m so excited for my baptism!" WOW

We got a new car this week. Like.. new new. Like, I-drove-it-off-the-lot new. Like it had 13 kilometers and basically zero gas cuz IT HAD NEVER BEEN USED..... I guess ever like 5 or 8 years each car is switched out and we were just lucky that we had the car when they switched it! Its an automatic too. Suuper weird change from driving stick for the last 9 months of my life.. I swung in, sat down, put my right foot on the brake, and my left foot on the............ nothing. :) hah also weird when it starts moving forward without you having to do anything! Woah! Technology...!

Last week basically all of these months of brainbusting overwhelming office work came to fruition when I found a huge mistake in the financial archives of the mission´s payment system... (if you don´t know anything about accounting like I didn´t before I came to the office this probably won´t make much sense to you... sorry). My job here is basically declare or ´´journal´´ (the term used to declare or report) all of the expenses (and ALL means ALL)(down to every penny that every missionary uses) of our mission. To shorten the story a little bit, we have a program in the office, made by the church, that allows me to make all 90 (or so) monthly rent payments for all the apartments in the mission just by clicks basically.. instead of going to the bank in person with written bank transfers or writing checks to each landlord. It makes my job a lot easier and a lot more effective time-wise. Turns out, these monthly payments have a programmed account code ("chart of accounts" accounting stuffs) attached to each payment that will in turn automatically "journal" or declare the money payed to its corresponding account. (those of you that just reread that last sentence to try to understand it better, don´t worry, just continue reading and pretend to understand.... :D) Well a huge chunk of these automatic payments had an incorrectly assigned account code... and month after month after month the payments were made to the landlord, but the money was declared in a wrong account. SSSOOoooo I went back month by month through every monthly payment from this year (cuz last year has already been closed out and you can´t really get back into it) and fixed (correction journals) anywhere between 6 and 18 payments, for each month, to their correct accounts.  It ended up being this huuge project that took the entire afternoon and evening and when I finished I turned around to my companion and was like.. Look! Look what i just did! And tried to explain the whole thing to him... and he gave me the same kind of confused face you guys had when you read about all the accounting stuff. Haha It was like he wanted to be proud of me but didn´t reeeeally get the whole picture... so I just said NVM and texted elder castillo who knows a lot about accounting. :) Elder Castillo is awesome. He has called himself to be the organizer and planner of celebrations. :P so he invited us over a couple nights later for dinner and made me an apple pie to celebrate my good work. :) Don´t worry mom! They´re taking good care of me!

One last thing before I gotta go. Today we went with the Castillos, the three fuengirola hermanas, and the other single office sister that got to our mission at the beginning of october to a city down the coast from malaga called Nerja. Elder Núñez is there right now with an Elder named Elder Allen who´s birthday is on monday. We went to some cool caverns at about 10 and then went to a brazilian meat place for lunch with the Nerja Elders for Elder Allens birthday. I´ll attach pictures of these caverns. Incredible!! You can look up "cueva de nerja".

Anyways, I think thats all I we gotta go. Transfers are in a week and a half and my replacement will get transfered here! We´re excited for him to come! I´m still really torn about leaving. I feel like I´m finally really in a groove and now their booting me! :S hah Ehh! Thats the mish!

Love you all! Give Hilary a huge hug for me!

Élder Norton