Hey there yall!! The following will explain itself. My awesome companion typed this all up for me. He is solid gold! I had to take my placement tests today and in the interest of time I didn't have enough time to email everyone. I am just about all set up for classes!! yay!! We have some awesome people we are teaching. Great experiences this week. Love it all! I got called "squints" in sacrament meeting. Lol one of the sisters said I reminded her of him, off of Sandlot. Thats not the first time I have been told that. Contacts here I come!! lol It was a great week. I love yall! thanks so much for all yall do. God bless you. :D

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dominick Franchino <dominick.franchino@myldsmail.net>
Date: Mon, Oct 1, 2012 at 12:21 PM
Subject: Hey Family and Freinds and Others...
To: swest@myldsmail.net

Ok, so we are in a bit of an interesting situation today. We had a CRAZY awesome week of just one experience after another, so this might be a lengthy letter. ALSO, I (Elder Franchino) am sitting inside of Troy com pas in a secure testing room and my companion, (Elder West) is next to me taking a college placement test... lol, he he is stressing out, I just heard him say "What in the world is that!!" and I glanced over and he had a math problem on the screen with a couple quad-ratics and a few 'tan' and 'cos' thrown in for fun.... lol he has totally forgotten it all since school. Anyways, So I am typing up this email and it will be sent to both of our families for the week since he is using all his time to take the test. So, bring out the bullets and here we go!

-- Elder West had a very funny bike wreak this week, he started to try to climb a steep embankment next to the parking lot, got about half way up and couldn't climb anymore. So he wound up tripping up and falling backwards and landing flat on his back on the asphalt, lol, I was cracking up it was so funny to watch (Plus it's ok to laugh because his backpack took the hit and he is totally ok)

-- We got invited, along with our investigator family to go out to a members house and have dinner. MAN ALIVE!!! It was good, they bought premium hamburger patties and grilled em up, oh man it was out of this world!!!

-- We wound up doing some "power service" this week for an old couple in the ward, we had no time this week to do it so we threw it into overdrive and dressed down-prosed (Took off our Proselyting clothes) and ran over and did yard-work for about 30 minutes, got it all done and cleaned off and up-prosed again. The whole thing took about an hour, but we got super itchy from some of the vines and weeds we were ripping out of plants and bushes, also came across some pretty crazy looking spiders!!! Elder West freaked out when I pointed them out, lol gotta love the South

-- We were asked to give a blessing to a foreign exchange student from Thailand this week, so we spent 30 minutes climbing over the language barrier and helping her understand the priesthood and what-not, it was super spiritual once it was all said and done though...

-- One of our AWESOME investigators brought a dozen donuts to one of our lessons this week and said "Eat em all!" Once we were demanded that authoritatively... we obeyed... Ummy! =P

-- We got caught biking in the rain the other night, which has happened before but this time in particular it was raining cats and dogs!! Just buckets and buckets of water, and once we got to the church we went in the bathroom and starting ringing out our clothes and the water just poured out. So yet another tie gone the way of every poor silk tie brought to the south, lol I have got to start wearing poly's whenever we don't have a car or I am going to be out of ties soon! Lol, not really, I have tons more....

-- We had a "free pizza" day (to make up for them turning off our water so many times the last couple months) for lunch this Saturday and found out that our maintenance man is a Mormon from California, gotta find out more of his story...

-- We had our Zone Training this last week, which was really cool! We had the whole Zone here and the main focus was on our Ward Mission plan, speaking of which, nobody seems to use their WMP's enough, so go ask your ward mission leader what your wards WMP is and get a copy of it!!

-- So, I (Franchino) got a notice that the UPS man was trying to deliver me a box, but the hours they deliver in is 10-5 and we are ALWAYS gone 10-9... So the office was never open and after several attempts they were going to just return to sender so I left a note asking them to hold it at the center of distribution (about a mile from our apartment). So they did, for 3 days... On the third day we made it there and they were only open from 3pm-6pm!!! We could hardly believe those hours! lol, but we wound up getting there later and got it picked up, but it was 25 lbs... so it sat on my bike while I pushed it towards home, on the shoulder of the city's main highway... it was fun! But luckily a member a few blocks away offered to bring it by in his car, so I didn't push it all the way home... It turned out to be birthday package from home, it was awesome!!! Thanks so much!

-- So, we knocked on this door and right away this beater truck pulled up and the lady started screaming "Just GO AWAY!!!!"...

(Me)--- "Ok, Ma'am, have a great day! :) "

(Crazy lady)--- "What gives you the right to do this ^$%& anyways!!! >:( "

(Me)--- "The First Amendment ma'am. God Bless!!!"

(Crazy lady)--- "OHH... ya right... whatever you sayyyyy..... >:P "

-- We walk to next house, she starts getting her case of beer out of the bed of the truck...she starts yelling across the yard

(Crazy lady)--- "HEY GUYS!!!... (Something derogatory)"

(Me)--- We respect your feelings ma'am, that's ok for you to feel. Have a Nice day! "

(Crazy Lady)-- " Well I don't respect yours, you are members of a @%@# cult!!"

(Me) ---- "Ok, ma'am, god bless you!"

(Crazy lady)--- "HEY!!! BOYS!! You want a beer!?!?!"

(Me)--- "No thanks ma'am, we are good! Thanks though!"

(Crazy Lady)--- "Oh no you are not, someone just told you that you were...."

--- Then the neighbor answered that door and we started talking to him and ignored the rest of what she was screaming... It was super funny, loved it!!!

-- The SOUTH IS SNOWING!!!!! Not really, all the cotton it bloomed out though so it looks like snow... looks really cool!

-- We were biking to our destination and passed the opening to a neighborhood and felt we needed to turn back, we went back and we went down the block a bit and knocked just one house and found an awesome family who has had a ton of exposure to the Church and is BEST friends with our first counselor, really cool experience.

-- We had a really good and lon visit with an athiest uy this visit, he is to stuburn though, but it was a great conversation, really memorable...

-- Last but not least. We spent yesterday (fast Sunday) driving to the far corners of our area and contacting all the in-actives and other people who we know nothing about. We met G.G. (his initials) he grew up in the church but fell away and the recent events in his life are really amazing, just three weeks ago he pulled out of storage his quad and started reading it again. Then out of the clear blue sky, his home-teacher showed up on Sunday (the first contact from the church in years!) and he had a great visit and G.G. said he wanted the missionaries to come over and teach him, his new wife and his friend. Well... we never heard anything from his home teacher, we just happened to try and see him at his listed address and he had moved, so we marked him off and were about to move on when we decided to ask his neighbors if they knew how we could get hold of him. So the first neighbor didn't know anything so we asked the other, now this is deep south boonies, and they gave us "directions" (anyone who has gotten directions from the southern boonie folk know why I put quotes around that). And once we got to where we thought he was, we wound up being in the wrong place, so we asked some guy and he directed us farther into the trailer park. Once there we knocked on the door and... it wasn't him. But, it was a nice guy who actually agreed to take the lessons! So with one new investigator in pocket we had come this close to our weeks goal of 8 new investigators (he was the seventh, and it was 7pm on a Sunday night..) So he directed us to a different trailer park down the road and we went all the way to the back and lo and behold, found G.G.!!! He invited us in and started telling us his story and when we found out that he had requested missionaries just hours before we were just about dumb-struck! His home teacher had made no effort to contact us but that didn't stop us from winding up at his door-step just hours later! He introduced us to his wife and then started bearing down in humble powerful testimony and telling about how he gained it. Now this is a grizzled big guy with a jagged necklace and a raising-cain attitude, before he was done he was brought to tears, his wife was crying and we were on missionary cloud nine! We set up a teaching schedule and left for home marveling at everything that had just happened, we realized how the lord had guided his home teacher that day, then saw fit to guide us from place to place by back-country "directions" until we wound up at his door that very day, and and he even provided the 2 new investigators through that journey that we had prayed for and had set the goal in faith for. It was a wonderful way for us the end the day, our fast and our week.

Love ya'all, hope everyone has a great week! I loved all the letters and emails!! Thanks for taking the time to send those.

-- Elder Franchino and Elder West