Goodmorning y'all! I hope that y'all had an amazing Thanksgiving weekend and survived black Friday! This week was totally wack, we branded calves on Wednesday, but I write about that a little later 😂
On Tuesday we went to Nancys house to help her remodel her house. We helped her remodel her side door entrance thingy. The bottom was totally rotted so we had to help her make a new one with some old leftover wood. It wasn't too hard to do, but it was alot of fun! After that we had a lesson with her, we read from 3 nephi 11. She talked alot about how the Book of Mormon and the bible say alot of the same stuff. Then we went to a members house to have an early Thanksgiving dinner with them!
The church owns a huge 38,000 acre, 36,000 head, cattle ranch here in Mexia, and the Branch President is the head ranch manager of all of it. He invited us to come and help them brand calves on Wednesday, so that's what we did Wednesday morning! So we got there and they were already branding the calves so I watched for a few minutes while Elder Palmer was already helping pin the calves down because he used to do it back at home! So the calves were separated from the other cows in a corral and then some of the workers would go towards the calves on there horse and rope a calf. Then they would drag it over to everyone else. Where two dudes would pin it on the ground, while a few other people were going around giving the pinned calves vaccines and branding them and marking their ears and also collecting some oysters 😂 After that they would let the calf go into another part of the corral separated from the others that haven't been branded. The whole process takes about 1 minute per calf, and they would do three or four calves at a time. I was able to help pin down about 15 calves. After about four hours we were done. We did about 425 calves, they said that that's a pretty average day! We're gonna go help them again on Thursday!
On Thursday we had Thanksgiving at our Branch Presidents house, they said this is the only day that they have Turkey 😂 after eating too much food we then went to another members house to play some games with them and some of their friends from Houston. And that's basically all that we did on Thursday.
The next day we went do to Waco to have district council. We had district council with another district because some Sisters from Austin were gonna give us a training on facebook finding. They should us some different ways that we could try to find people on Facebook. So we made a service ad on Facebook marketplace and then made a free brownies post. We found a few people threw that.
On Saturday someone who saw our service ad wanted us to come over to their property and help them take leaves. Turns out that their property was a flipping ostrich ranch! They would breed ostriches and then butcher them! They also had a couple of water buffalo just chilling out on there property! We got a little tour of the place and got to go meet the water buffalo and then look at the ostriches. After we finished raking, they offered us lunch. They gave us ostrich burgers! Which tastes alot like beef, turns out that ostrich meat is red meat like beef. It was super good! After that we went down to Waco again for interviews with President Fox. After that we got dinner at Torchys and then we went to the Magnolia Market at the Silos. Which is kinda like Gardner Village but alot bigger. It was a neat place to go and look around at!
On Sunday we had sacrament meeting. We then made and delivered some brownies to people. Turns out that one if the people that we gave brownies to has been recently taught by missionaries 😂 So we might try to meet with her sometime soon! Later we went to Nancys house and we talked about faith read from Ether 12.
That's pretty much everything that I have to tell y'all about for this week. Have an awesome week everyone! Elder Jake Okelberry
🦄 Me and Elder Palmer pinning a calf down while its getting branded 🍎 Me in front of a tree at the Silos📱 A totally cute kitten we met on Sunday while delivering brownies, I named him/her Chad🐳 Us after district council 🐃 One of the water buffaloes