Elder Dane Durante: Happy Birthday to Me!!

Music is important to me. The rule in my mission is that we can only listen to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. That has been a weakness for me and honestly something that I don't want to give up. On Monday it started to rain and we took shelter for a bit under a store awning. As we were waiting, I said a prayer and said, "if I should only listen to Mo Tab then let lightning strike." Lightning struck! Then I said, "I need to be sure, let lightning strike again." Again, lightning struck immediately!! So, I guess I need to obey the music rule.

I gave my first blessing in Portuguese! There was a sister in our district meeting that asked me to do it because she wasn't feeling well.

When we got back from proselyting at the end of the day on Tuesday, we had a new asphalt road in front of our house! Nice!

We taught a lesson to a kid that was wearing a police ankle lock/monitor. I guess he was on house arrest. He lives by the "chicken forest". I call it that because there are a bunch of trees where chickens just hang out and roost. One night I crept over and clapped real loud and about 50-60 chickens fell out of the trees and freaked out. It was hilarious!

I turned 19 years old on Wednesday. President and Sister Lago stopped by for a surprise inspection of our house. We did well with the inspection but the previous occupants had some dishes and glasses which were nasty dirty so Sister Lago quickly threw them in the garbage. They took us out to lunch and I had this amazing "torta do banana" with ice cream! That was my birthday!

Sweet mangos!

Thursday we got our water shut off because someone didn't pay the bill. It got turned on the next day luckily. My shirts art getting dirty! I think more than normal. Partly due to the fact that my bag strap is leaving a mark. I've got to figure out how to take care of this!

The fire alarm/smoke detector went off in the middle of the night on Saturday! We could not get it to stop! There was internal batteries so we couldn't remove them and so we called Pres. He said to put it in the freezer, so we did. After 5-10 minutes it still didn't stop, so he gave us permission to smash it. My comp grabbed it and threw it against the wall. It stopped.

Sunday we thought it would be funny to switch name tags. I wore Elder Bustamante's name tag and he wore mine. Not one person even noticed! President Nelson rolled out the new youth initiative to the church that will begin in 2020. The restoration continues!!