Jan 1 handwritten letter

Dear Family, January 1, 2008

Happy New Year! The fireworks they shot off here were insane. Fireworks aren’t regulated so the entire city was full of fireworks. It was incredible to see fireworks lighting up the sky in all directions as far as we could see. I wasn’t planning to stay up and watch them, but they woke me up anyway, (even with ear plugs) so I got up and went to the window to watch the.
This week will be our last proselyting on Friday. I feel a lot more confident with my language skills but I am still only subject conversational. I can carry on a good conversation about the gospel and I can talk about where I am from, for the most part I’m getting good at listening and nodding when appropriate. I haven’t checked my e-mail yet so I don’t know how things have been going for you in the last two weeks. So I will mainly focus my letter on myself.
I spent most of this week working on the twenty verb conjugations. Each verb has 6 conjugations for each of the tenses. We for the most part only use 4 of the conjugations, but they have more than 6 tense, they have about 12. But to get the others you have to combine one of the other 6 with a verb like ter or ser or haver. They are each not that difficult and Portuguese doesn’t have to many irregular verbs but when you put it all together it is a rather daunting task.
My Christmas letter will most likely arrive on the same day as this one because it was Christmas day on p-day so we didn’t get to go out and mail letters or send e-mails.
After tomorrow we will be the senior most district in our branch. There are districts that are in the week between my branch and the one leaving tomorrow but non of them are in our district.
I also found out that Robert Jordan (The author of the Wheel of Time series) died without finishing his last book. He did leave notes and memoirs and instructions for his wife to see that the series is finished but it is still aggravating to know that he went and died before he finished it. But it really is only a side note. I don’t concern myself with it much. One of the missionaries I met loves the series and it does concern him that Robert Jordon is dead.
On a completely separate note altogether. I am feeling quite good about things in general. I have been working hard and learning a lot.
My companions and I are working well together, (it still takes a lot of patients to work with 2 other people but I am getting used to it). I finished off my memory card and will send it in a card of some sort, I have been told that the safest way to ensure it gets home is to send it in a nice thick card that has fluffy decorations.
I will try to send a letter that gives the names of those in the pictures, I finished it off with the talent show, I couldn’t fit all of the talent show in the one memory card but I had planned to finish it off with the show anyway. For now this is all but you will be getting so many letter from me at the tame this comes I doubt you will be wishing form more from me.
I love you all,Elder Reed Risenmay