Inching towards my mission

Just got back from the last Mission prep class. I missed last week because I was in Atwater visiting Grandma and Grandpa Boothe. Nate and Kevin Escobar (the guys living with me and Garit right now) went with us.

For those who've never met either of them they're active members of the Church who've been living with me and Garit since January. Nate is 21 and Kevin is my age, which is 18. Nate is 6'7 and a goofy guy. Despite his goofiness he's actually quite normal in comparison to his family (whom I've never been in contact with for very long except his brother Kevin). By the way this is something that Nate himself has said many times before. Nate sometimes works with Garit and me but after he and his brother brought an XBox 360 into the house Garit and I have been helping him recover from his addiction to the darned thing. He's sociable though and he pull off some funny jokes.

Kevin basically doesn't work at all. If you want a good picture of Kevin think of me, except a thousand times more random and hyper. He's also waaaaay more into video games than I am. He loves orange chicken almost as much as I like pizza and he enthusiastically washes our dishes, which is great because nobody wants to do it. He's fun to play video games with and he's a very nice guy.

As I've already told Ryan, Becca, and Dad I turned in a lot of petitions! I'm expecting my biggest paycheck on Wednesday. Last week I turned in about 912 signatures.

3/21/10

Okay so I received the check for that and instead of receiving five to six hundred dollars like I was expecting I received only THREE-HUNDRED AND THIRTY SEVEN DOLLARS! Yeah I'm not too happy about it as you can see. My validity was 42%! That's abysmal! That's really, really bad for those of you who aren't familiar with petitioning. The thing is though I'm not the only one who got a low validity. We all did, we meaning me, Garit, Isaac, and Nate. We have no way of telling whether or not Derek's telling us the truth. Derek's the guy who pays us and gives us our petitions.

So, like I said before, we have no way of telling whether Derek's being honest with us or not. So we're going to be conducting an experiment. Garit contacted the Modesto distributor (his name is Carl Towe) and we are going to turn our petitions in to him and we're going to see how that works out. Actually we'll do one turn-in to Derek and one turn-in to Carl. If we have a higher validity with Carl than we're probably going to go work for him. If not, then we'll stay with Derek.

Working for Carl sounds like it would be a better deal than working for Derek since Carl doesn't hold 10% of our paycheck back and he mails our checks in instead of Garit having to drive up to Stockton every week. We'd have to sign independent contractor forms though, but I don't know what that entails and I felt uneasy the first time I heard Garit bring that up.

So on Friday evening I attended an overnight camping trip to Monterey. It was with the Scout troop and most of the people that came were the 11/12 year olds. They actually weren't that bad and they made pretty good food too. For dinner they made burritos and for breakfast we had breakfast-in-a-bag. Breakfast-in-a-bag is when you crack two eggs and put them into a Zip lock bag and you put cheese, bacon, whatever you want to go into your omelet and you put it over a pot of boiling water. It's that simple and it's that good too. We didn't do anything on Friday evening except set-up our tents and eat since we arrived at like 10:00 at night due to the fact that our leaders got lost a couple of times. On Saturday we took an historic hike of Monterrey which was kind of boring since I really don't care about California history. We were going to hike on Cannery Row but we decided not to since everyone was so tired by the end.

One last thing. I've done almost all of my physical exam. The only thing left to do is get the immunizations. I'll have to talk to Dad about that. If I get them then they're probably going to be really expensive!

Well that's it for me. Hope to see you all soon,

Grant