July 8, 2013

Dear Family,

  Well, those pictures sure look sad. No more fires in the house, I guess we'll have to adapt and do something interesting, like a fire pit in the middle of the playroom. Nice job cleaning up though, and the picture must have been the funniest thing ever with the 'cannon' sticking out of the door.
  I forgot my camera today but I found a member family this past week that owned a MUSTANG and the allowed me to sit in it with the car turned ON!!! Talk about trust! Place it was a manual anyway so I couldn't drive it, BUT I will have pictures next week. I was so happy.
  For the 4th of July, we had another lockdown mission conference. The new dress standards were introduced from the lds.org/missionary website, and with shocking news that we can't have backpacks anymore!!! They want us to use side bags, which I feel weird in cuz it looks like a purse....and no dad purses are NOT my style! If y'all could send me one it would be nice. There are pictures of some appropriate ones on the church website that can give you some ideas. Personally if it could be black or dark grey that would be cool. ugh I'll pay y'all back for the expenses...I feel like I just eat money.
  At the mission conference, we also got the option to watch a movie and we watched TOY STORY 3!!! Sure I've seen it before but it was nice to sit down and enjoy a funny movie. Even spanish buzz mode!!! I understood just about every word that he spoke! Seeing the movie was funnier then than it ever has been! Oh what the mission does..
  The area is still cruising along. We realized that we need the branch presidents help because he holds the keys to the branch. We'll be involving him more so this week since we have branch council tomorrow. It's rough right now, we had another hard week. Both the people we are teaching fell off date because they didn't come to church. But we keep working hard. We got by the spirit a lot, and since we don't do much tracting anymore, we fill in our planning with names of people that we know that are members, less-actives, or non-members. We're here to help everyone so we are trying to visit EVERYONE! Its a lot of work but a lot of fun too.
  Thanks for preparing the letter. It'll help a lot and I'm really looking forward to it.
  Also the package you sent was great! You're right mom, we couldn't use the sparklers so I gave the fireworks to our landlords who gave them to their grand kids. They enjoyed it. Everything else in the box came in tact though so no worries there.
  Thanks for the continual support. I hope my work pays off by bringing blessings back home.
Love y'all a lot!

Elder Parks