Week 31 - Hawaiian Pizza + Brownies = Costco Blueberry Muffins

 

Hello everyone, it's me again!

Wow, what a week. As far as finding and teaching goes, this week was pretty rough. Not that we didn't try, but 13 of our 17 lessons we had set up cancelled. Fun times. In addition to that, we've also been crazy busy with everything else going on in our missionary lives at the moment. Ted is still doing great though; we absolutely love him. We had a 30 minute conversation with him last night about this week's Book of Mormon chapters from the "Come, Follow Me" manual which was all about the wars. He absolutely loved them and had so many great questions! Denise is also officially back in Arkansas, which breaks my heart. The Elders down there are ready to help her out though, and the young women's leader and the branch president are both soooo excited to have her.

Alright, want to know what's been keeping us busy this week? Well, first of all, meetings as usual. Goodness we are in so many meetings. Then, photoshoots (gag). Also, recording various videos for our Facebook page and the NDBM virtual choir that Sister Astle and I are a part of. Finally, data analysis. Oooooooh boy. More details on that mayhem to come!

One photoshoot this week was particularly memorable. Why? Because my companion could have straight up DIED. We were taking pictures in one of the sunflower fields, and she got stung by a bee. Sister Astle is freaking ALLERGIC TO BEES. Queue us speeding to the other Sisters' apartment for benadryl because we knew we didn't have any, only to find out they had locked their apartment (which they normally never do). Cut to me continuing to be a NASCAR driver to the nearest member's house I could think of and knocking on the door asking for benadryl and tweezers. Thankfully they had some! Good times. 

Ok, let's talk data! So on... Thursday I think? I volunteered to be over the missions data for the ads we've been running. I knew without a doubt that I could do that, because it's just Excel, right? Wrong. Horribly, miserably wrong! This quickly turned into me being in charge of not just the data for all the ads, but also all the data for all 13 facebook area pages we're running and all 3 instagram pages. Already, that's a LOT of data to sift through, export, organize, and analyze, but then they added the icing on the cake and told me they didn't just want an Excel spreadsheet with some well constructed charts; no, they wanted an interactive dashboard created with Google Data Studio. Have you ever heard of that? No? Well neither had I! 

From the moment I got off that call I began doing as much research on it as humanly possible, watching every tutorial the internet had to offer, and staring at countless numbers. I was watching/listening to these videos starting at 7:30 am as I was getting ready for the day and clear until 10:30 pm as I was getting ready for bed. Lunch and dinner breaks were also consumed by this. Study time was spent entirely studying this mess. I'm extremely pleased to report, however, that those 3 days of melting my brain has paid off and the first dashboard is in the works! The amount of data we have for the ads is so insufficient to come to any real conclusions, it's almost comical. That will only improve with time though!

This week I also learned how to do something new on Facebook: ban people from our page! This was a fun time. We had had this guy commenting stupid things on our page's ad with some colorful language, but not too big of a deal because our page auto-hides any comments with profanity. WELL. This sir then calls the number listed on our page, which is our phone number. Goodness. I've been cussed at before, but this was every other word. This guy is straight up CRAZY. He's a "firm believer in Pinocchio" in his own words, and sure enough, his profile's bio is, "Firm believer in..... Pinocchio 🤥 connect the dots people! Ooooor open your eyes, either 1! Oilinmyviens." Like I said, CRAZY. After trying to explain to him that we literally cannot control whether our ads come across his profile or not and he was still saying only the nicest of things, I then hung up on him. THIS SIR then goes through every single one of our posts and reacts to each with a mad face and leaves a rude comment. We saw this and started hiding his comments, and he sees this and calls again. I sent him to voicemail, and his voicemail was pretty colorful too! So then I found out how to ban him. Also blocked him on my personal profile.

On Wednesday we drove into Bismarck for another service project which was fun! We deep cleaned this old house that had been repurposed into an office for United Way, a charity organization. We were the only ones assigned to that project, so we were thankfully able to do it even though it was indoors. 

Yep, I think that just about sums up our week! Pretty crazy.

If you made it all the way here, the email subject is because, for reasons scientists may never know, the smell of a Papa John's Hawaiian pizza with the smell of their brownies legit smells exactly like Costco's blueberry muffins. We were shook. Still am.

Sister Balls