Sister Shelley Bushman: Ladies and Gentlemen, this is transfer no. 5

Guten Tag, my dearies -

Points to everyone who gets the weird little reference I tried to make in the title.

I'm beginning to write this while sitting in St. Stephan's Dom. They have these really great half-hour organ concerts every day at 12 - but they are only through the summer. There are only 2 weeks left, so Sister Bishop decided to go again. This church is just breathtakingly beautiful. You have to wonder how many sacrifices over how many years went into making something so incredibly breathtaking and grand.

The biggest news to share is from transfers - I get to STAY my last transfer here in Passau with Sister Bishop!!! That means that this is my FIFTH transfer with Sister Bishop. I will have spent 7 1/2 months attached to the hip of this lovely lady. I don't have a single complaint. I'm really happy President Kohler is letting me stay my last transfer in Passau. We have a lot going on now and we're just SUCH good friends - leaving her or leaving here so close to the end would have broken my heart. But, never fear, I'm still here!

Wearing their Sister Missionary
blazers that they usually never wear

Sister Bishop and I spent some time making our goals for this final transfer. We are going to try and put a big emphasis on finding - we just want to find oodles and oodles of people for Sister Bishop and her new comp to teach after I leave. Sister Bishop promised me that she won't let me go home until we've really felt like we went hard and killed it. And she'll make sure that we'll get me packed up in time so that I don't panic about that either. Yay! I had a couple more moments this week where I was like I have less weeks here than I have fingers and I feel like I want to cry and chain myself to the bathroom sink, but then we go finding instead and that's a better use of time. :)

We had a really fun service project this week. The ward mission leader in Neuötting (part of our district) organized that we would go to these couple of nursing homes and sing some hymns and old Bayerisch tunes. It was so fun because there were a lot of people there who had dementia or Alzheimer's but they would remember all the words to "Die Gedanken sind frei" or "Zigeurnerlied" or "Bayernhymne". They were just SO happy that we were there. Way fun stuff.

I also decided on two life ambitions for my life this week. One, we have this one member that we do service for almost every week. He has three giant apple trees with THE best apples that I have ever consumed. He has this like, endless supply of apples and jelly and jam and juice and absolutely everything. We got to help pick and cut some this week. I've decided that I greatly want an apple tree one day.

That, and I also decided that I want to pick up my flute again. Fun fact: Sister Bishop and I both played the flute in middle school, but both stopped. There's a cute girl in our branch who plays flute and so she brought hers on Sunday so we could play with it. It made me so flute trunky. I think one of my biggest regrets of my young life so far is that I gave up the flute. I guess I just need a reason to play it again. Like, join a community orchestra or something. At seeing my longing to play her daughter's flute all day, the branch president's wife suggested that I try and be in an orchestra at BYU. But......there's plenty of people who KNOW how to actually play there. Naja. Not important now. But I jotted my desire down and I'll put it in my "für später" box. :)