The struggle is real, ladies and gentleman. Sometimes you just get attacked with negative vibes and all you can do is look upward and press onward cause there really isn't any other logical choice to progress. 

We had some struggles with our investigators this last week. And their families. I went to the court-house to deal with the speeding week from about two weeks back, that went worse than expected, this also required us to drive all the way up to corpus two different days. Then I got vertigo and threw up for the first time on the mission, before going on an exchange - where we then ran out of food, thank goodness for subway.

Now the problem with all of my problems from this last week was that they're all self-inflicted. There was preventative things that I could've done to stop all of the above from happening but I was behind the curve, just messed up, or wasn't thinking and then was forced to deal with all of the consequences. 

My driving record is officially 'clean' though I am not sure it was dirty before. I had to go and present my case in front of a judge, in hopes that he would explain my options and maybe have some mercy on me. Well, the judge was incredibly nice, but he didn't actually help me at all. I had to pay for court costs, something else and then finally the defensive driving course which all adds up to about the amount of the ticket. In addition, I will be spending the next six hours on the computer taking an online defensive driving course - pobrecita sis hortal gets to sit next to me and watch. 

Something I failed to mention in my last email from when we got to go and visit the USS Lexington, S Hortal and I had a rather creepy encounter with a worker named Jeremy who tried to show us the locked up parts of the ship - like some type of 'special tour' anyway, we got out of there and away from him rather quickly but S Hortal has now been suffering with nightmares. When you're companion suffers, you suffer. Waking up in the morning to nightmares has been a little stressful, though luckily I haven't had any.

Our investigators really boil down to Meryk, his grandparents are from Washington - lacey, lakewood and tukwila area. There is a point in time when as a missionary we are suppose to drop people who are not progressing or who have heard all the lessons before and haven't done anything. Meryk's grandparents are getting cold feet with Meryk's baptism and we've gotten to the point where we have taught him all the lessons, he just has to decide what he wants to do. The mission leaders say, he either needs to get baptized or we need to stop visiting them, we'll see. 

Now for the story on throwing up after getting vertigo. Well it was self-inflicted pain, all starting with a pineapple. Yes, I had bought a pineapple last preparation day and then proceeded to eat all of it during weekly planning on Friday and that really was a bad idea, I felt sick for the rest of the day which cause me to not eat much of anything else until that night, before the exchange we stopped and got an ice cream cone from McDonald's since we hadn't had dinner and apparently that was a bad idea. The 'acidity' from the pineapple and the 'base' from the ice cream didn't sit well in my stomach - weird part was it caused me to feel as though I was spinning until I threw up the ice cream, it was a rough day. Never eat a whole pineapple, ever. 

As I said before, I could've avoided all of these things but I wasn't paying good enough attention. I was transgressing. I didn't know or pay attention to the amount of pineapple that I consumed, I didn't see the "school zone" sign while I was driving, S. Hortal and I didn't know we would be in danger when we wandered away from the elders, but we suffered for all of the above. Ignorance is not bliss when it comes to making mistakes. We just have to pay attention and make the best decisions that we can. We will save ourselves a lot of pain. 

Still loving the island, and all of you

H mckenna Crawford