August 3, 2008 (Sunday)
The Lord’s Hand in my Life: Having fun and being silly…even if it is immature…

It was Fast Sunday today, and I knew exactly what I was going to fast for. I fasted that Andrei and my kids would be taken care of when I leave, and that I would have feelings of peace and comfort when I leave Andrei. I’m really going to need help with being able to leave him. I’ve been praying for peace so much that I bet the Lord is getting sick of hearing me ask him.

I think leaving is getting to me because today I felt irritated and antsy even at church. I had a hard time focusing on the lesson and noticed I was being more short than normal. I was a little short with Kenz, and I apologized to her. I don’t know how to handle leaving. I’m really excited to go on our 10 day Europe trip, and I’m excited to go home and see my friends and family, but I’m really sad to leave Andrei and my kids. I’m torn…

At church Sora Padoru bore her testimony and she did part of it in English so we could understand. It was so cute. I was very impressed that she cared enough about us to try and speak in our language. Melissa bore her testimony in perfect Romanian – none of the rest of us are very good at the language…so we kept our mouths shut. As the sisters were bearing their testimony I kept thinking how strong they are in their faith. Many of them are the only ones in their family practicing the LDS religion. That has to be hard to live a religion all by your self. I’ve always had good strong family members who I can look to as examples and gain support from…I take it for granted.

After church Annie and I went to make peach cobbler for joint dinner tonight with a yellow cake mix I had. My mom sent me three cake mixes from home, and they are very prized. You can’t buy them in Romania. Apparently I had chocolate flavored not yellow cake mix like I thought – so sadly I couldn’t make peach cobbler. It is one of my favorite desserts…oh well I’ll have to wait until I get home. We made cupcakes instead. They ended up tasting good anyways. I’m really missing home and simple things like being able to buy cake mix and normal ice cream at the store! I’m ready to come home to America!

Before dinner we had a meeting to discuss and plan our 10 day Europe trip that we leave for in 10 days. I’m really really excited about everything, and talking about all the things we want to do made me even more excited. We are going to be running everywhere we go to try and see everything, but I’m sure it will be a blast. We are going to Rome, Venice, Paris, London and then staying one night in Vienna before we fly home. We are only going to be in each city for about 2 days, but at least we’ll get a taste of each. The list of things we want to do in each city is probably more than we can handle and do, but we’ll try our best. We all have very limited funds, but we will budget. It’s going to be so fun! I’m stoked!

For dinner we had hoagie sandwiches and potato salad. Very good – perfect for the weather. It has been really really really hot today – so something light was wonderful. It was so hot I felt like I couldn’t get cool at all today. As we ate we were so hot we were eating dinner in as little clothing as possible without making one another uncomfortable – tank tops and shorts…oh I miss air conditioning…AHHH!

After dinner I found out a secret – the girls played another prank on me. I could have killed them. Apparently the girls and Radu (a teenage boy from the branch) made the entire thing up about the guy calling and saying he watched me workout. I’m sooooo glad it’s not true, but I couldn’t even sleep last night because I was so paranoid. Plus the really loud dog fight for 20 minutes didn’t help. The girls or culprits (specifically Mindy, Elyse and MacKenzie - the rest of the girls didn’t really know) were laughing so hard when they told me they made it up. They are gonna get it. They were like “we didn’t think you’d believe it!” Then I told them that normally I wouldn’t have, but I had a similar situation happen last semester that was real. Guys in my ward found a guy trying to look in my apartment window while I was getting dressed, and when they tried to confront him he ran away. Those girls…they will get what is coming to them…I will have to brain storm some ideas.

When we got back to our apartment Kenz and Mary got the bright idea to sprinkle water on people walking below – so I joined them. We were laughing hysterically. It wasn’t a lot of water – just enough for them to notice. They would look up and we would all duck. We were sooo obvious. We would be the worst spies ever. I love how mature we are…

Later we watched the movie The Ringer. It was so cute. I had never seen it before, but I loved it! Good times…