Holiday Greetings!

Merry Christmas a little late, and a happy New Year to everybody! It has been a wonderful holiday season this year, and I'm so glad to be back in Spokane to spend it with my family. It has been crazy around my house, but the holiday excitement has been a little fun. It has meant a few more headaches, but I can handle that. It has also meant way too much sugar. Oops! That tends to happen every year though.

One thing I am very grateful for this holiday season is the optometrist. Last Monday, I had an eye exam to figure out what has been going on with my eyes this past semester. I found out why my eyes have been getting to tired! Apparently, I am very very farsighted. My right eye is much much worse than my left eye though. My left eye has hardly any problem at all, while my right eye can't even handle the prescription that I need. The optometrist said that my eyes (well, my right eye) couldn't handle the full prescription, so I would have to work my way up to that full prescription over time. I had no idea that my eyes were that bad! He said that because my of the specific kind of farsightedness (I think that's how you would say it) that I have, the muscles in my eyes can compensate. I just have to put in a lot of effort to see things clearly. I was having to put in so much effort, that my eyes were noticeably tired. He was shocked that this was the first time in my life that I had complained about my eyes.

While at this appointment, I had my eyes dilated. It was weird because at the same time, as part of the dilation, my focusing lenses (in my eyes) were paralyzed. This meant that EVERYTHING around me was very blurry. While out and about after our eye exams, my dad and I went to get groceries while at Costco. One does not simply get their groceries when at Costco in the evening though. You practically have to try all the foods that they have out for customers to sample. Well, as you remember, I couldn't see anything. I had to ask my dad what everything was before I ate it. Things were going pretty well, I could see well enough to not run into everything, and the samples were good. Then we got to another sample. Just as I had been doing, I asked my dad what it was. He told me that they were little burritos. I thought, alright, then picked one up to try it. Turns out that it was not a burrito. It was some kind of puff pastry, and it had been frozen. I was not expecting that at all. We got a pretty good laugh out of it, and the lady doing that sample had fun too. She joking told me that I was not really in a Costco, but I was in a huge Walmart instead. That was a fun adventure for sure.

My glasses finally came in the day before I left back for Rexburg, and I love them. It's a weird change to be wearing them all the time, but it's kind of nice. It is hard though to retrain my eyes. For the longest time, they have worked super hard to focus. Now, I have to retrain them to unfocus and let the glasses do all the work.

Enough talking about my eyes. There is much more exciting news. I decided about a week ago that I am going to serve a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints this fall. I am thrilled to do this. For those of you who don't know a lot about this, I will explain it a little. Feel free to ask me any questions if you think of any. I would love to explain them to you the best I can. I am going on an 18 month mission. I am starting the paperwork process right now, and will hopefully be able to leave in late August or September. Once my paperwork is filled out, I will get a letter from the church headquarters in Salt Lake City that tells me where and when exactly I am going. At that point, I will start my final preparations, like making sure I have everything on the packing list for that specific area, and things like that. Once on my mission, I will have a very busy schedule teaching and serving others wherever I am sent. I will get up early each morning, study the holy scriptures with the other missionary that I am assigned to work with, and then we will go out and serve. We will knock on doors, go to our scheduled appointments, and look for ways that we can help others around us. That is just a very basic outline, but I am thrilled to be going! While on my mission, I will have one day a week that I have time to email and write my family and friends. I am planning on writing a mass email that I will send to my family for them to post on here for me. In other words, once I'm gone, this will be a missionary blog for those 18 months. It will have pictures of me on my mission that I will send back to my family, and letters that I send back. It will be a great way to stay caught up on what I'm up to. I could not be more excited for this opportunity. I am looking forward to it, and soon, I'll be counting down the days!