It has been a pretty good week in spite of the cold, and we even started using the bikes again midway through the week. It's startling how much the area we can realistically cover shrinks when we go from biking to walking. On Saturday around noon our district started sharing their transfer calls on the district facebook chat and by dinner time, Elder Greenhalgh and I were 99.9% sure that if either of us were getting transferred someone would have told us. We texted the APs to ask and they confirmed that they had indeed just completely forgotten to text us and that we were both staying for at least another 6 weeks which hopefully will be enough time to get the Affonsos baptized.
Luis has been working insane hours and has been getting about 3-4 hours of sleep a night. That finally caught up to him and by Sunday he was feeling sick and they didn't come to stake conference. Our next lesson with them is this Friday.
Elgin is similarly busy, but should be substantially reducing his hours sometime soon, which would allow him to meet with us a little more often.
On Wednesday we had zone conference which (unsurprisingly given the winter) had a big focus on being positive in addition to the usual practical advice on how to be effective missionaries. Our zone leaders, Elders VinZant and Craft, gave a great explanation of how the way we talk about our areas feeds into our enthusiasm and our diligence which feeds into our results which feeds into how we talk about our areas. It turns out that halfway through this last transfer Elder Fuller went home to get a foot surgery done, which means that in the course of about a month Eagle Creek ward went from 4 missionaries to 2 missionaries entirely for medical reasons.
After zone conference we had dinner with Fred Swift, who had some good questions about the restoration and how most young members of the church gain testimonies of it. He is still showing signs of progress, it just happens to be very slow progress.
I've been able to keep pretty warm thus far, but everyone has been warning us about a big cold snap that's coming soon, so we might have to change our strategy a little bit when that hits. So long as there are indoor apartment buildings to go to I think we can still get away with tracting.