Happy Halloween!

If you know me at all, you know that Halloween is NOT my favorite holiday - but getting emails from our missionaries makes it a WAY better day!

Today is Halloween. I hate Halloween, but it is not too annoying this year. I'm hoping that I don't have any trick or treaters. It's likely that I won't because I live in an apartment complex where you have to buzz someone or have a key to get in (I feel like my life is a bit like Seinfeld in that way). Also, no children live in my entire complex of 24 apartments so... blessing! As far as what we will do as missionaries, there is a curfew for missionaries in the city - we are to be in our apartments by 6:00 at night. We'll just be working on our lesson planning and stuff, but we'll also make cookies and some fun stuff I'm sure. Apparently the Book of Mormon musical has made "mormon missionaries" one of the most popular costumes this year, so you're right, it's definitely going to be best for us to not be outside. There have already been SO many Halloween parties, and I've seen enough drunk people around that I'm not going to fight it at all.

Thank you for the package! It arrived on Wednesday. Doing dishes is a blast now with my awesome IKEA scrubber. The letter file thing is already being put to use (it's exactly what I was wanting, so thanks for that!). The Reese's pumpkins were ah hah hawesome. They are so delish - like the Easter eggs. They are so much better than just normal Reese's. Also the scarves came very much in handy because it DID snow. They were saying 7 to 8 inches in parts of Mass but we only got about 2 where I live, and it's already all melted off the sidewalks and roads so that's nice. I DID make a purchase. Since the heaviest jackets I had were those button-up sweatshirt things, it was necessary to get a coat. Sis. Meier and I went to the Goodwill and I got 3 coats for 20 bucks each! Can you believe that? I got a thigh length brown one, and an ankle length black one. Also a lighter weight khaki one. TWENTY DOLLARS EACH. The Goodwill is twenty thousand times better than DI when it comes to cute clothes. Probably because it's right by BU. So that was a blessing. I tried on maybe 12 or 13 coats and bought three of them. Definitely the fastest coat shopping of my life. They're not the cutest things known to mankind, and they smell like dead old people, but since they were so inexpensive I can afford to get them all professionally cleaned and they'll still be cheaper than just ONE back home from what's known as a real store. So I'm gray hay hateful. <-- I don't know why I keep doing that.  [Editor's note:  In case you didn't figure it out, I believe she's just trying to spell out "grateful" as if she were saying it really weird.  :-) ] 

 Let's see.... this is the last week of my first transfer! That's pretty cool. We found out that no one in our whole zone is being transferred except for one guy who is going home. The rest is all the same, and I'll get to stay at the apartment in Brighton for at least another 6 weeks. Also we had Stake Conference this week! That was fun. We as Sisters were invited to go to the Priesthood session on Saturday afternoon because the topic was missionary work. That was a weird experience. But it was good. Then the adult session was Saturday night, and the Sunday one was 10 to 12 yesterday. My favorite was definitely the adult session. It was just SO good. There were three musical numbers and they were all superb, and the talks were all about missionary work too! The Stake Presidency out here is awesome, and Pres. and Sis. Evans spoke too. My favorite musical number was a barbershop quartet version of Lead Kindly Light. Did you hear me? I said BARBERSHOP QUARTET version of my favorite hymn in all the land! That was a cute little nice thing of God to do because barbershop always reminds me of being with my family at Disneyland (Big Thunder Mountain). So it was awesome and I was definitely displaying my most frequently used gift of the spirit (the ability to weep) :)

Quick, funny, unrelated story, but our ZLs are hilarious. We had a meeting that was supposed to be with the companionship of Elders that are over the LP wards with us, but they were on tours (that's what they call exchanges, isn't that weird?) with the ZLs so instead of having VanderHoek and Winegar, it was VanderHoek and Ellis. Elder Ellis is this big, hilarious black guy from Oregon and he just is one of those people that you want to copy. I'm totally using some of his phrasing already. One particularly hilarious moment  was when Elder VanderHoek said something but it came out wrong so we were all really confused at what he meant. Ellis just looked at him and said, "Son, that doesn't make a DARN piece of sense!" Oh mother. It was the greatest phrase I've ever heard. That will never not be funny. I just thought you'd appreciate that.

So, sickness. Yes I'm feeling almost 100% better. I just have a bit of a tickly throat but even that is almost unnoticeable. Blessing! Last Monday, right after we finished e-mailing, actually, we got a call from the mission doctor whom we had called the night before. When we called him, he said he lives in Natick which is not that far away in real LIFE, but is one of those places that we just couldn't get to on the T. It would be like an hour trainride down to the farthest south point, and then we'd still need a car to get there. So we were just going to tell him that we'd rather suffer for another week than walk a thousand miles to get to him. But when he called he said that he and his wife were just going to come up to Brighton, and that they wanted to take us out to lunch! So cute. They came to our apartment and checked us out. They thought it was viral and not yet bacterial so they just said to pay attention to how we feel, and if we weren't better by Friday to call them back and they'd give us ABX. Luckily we WERE better by then. But yeah, they took us out to lunch and were so sweet and wanting to take care of us. They lived in Highland for like 20 years, but then moved to AF (and then Massachusetts, obviously). Their last name is the Saunders, not sure if we know them or not, but they lived in the Alpine Country Club. One of their sons is the founder of Zupas! Fun stuff. So that was a giant miracle! Super nice of them, and way convenient for us. 

~Sister Broekhuijsen 

I realize this ends rather abruptly, but the rest of the email was kind of more addressed to immediate family - so if you're the highly curious type, you can give me a call and I'll let you know what shoes she needs to have sent to her, etc.  :-)