Don't Forget Snail Mail

Dear family and friends,

This week went by super slowly. In my last e-mail I neglected to mention a fact or two about my area. I am in the northeast part of my mission in an area called Cottonwood. Half of the geography of my mission went to the new Farmington, New Mexico mission that opened up but the number of missionaries in my mission has increased since that time. We now have over 200 missionaries and when I got here our mission had two new zones. One of them is the Cottonwood zone where I'm in. Elder Mortimer and I cover two wards: The Black Hills and Mountain View ward. Both of them are pretty small wards.

It's the mountain-ish area and it's super cold! Yesterday it snowed twice! I've been having to use my suit a lot more than I thought and as a result it's gotten dirty. Elder Mortimer and I will be going to the Thrift store and getting me a suit for about $10.

My p-day situation has been very weird up to this point. My p-day in the MTC was on Wednesdays and my p-day in the mission field is on Mondays and I left the MTC on Tuesday the 16th. As a result I didn't have a p-day that week. The weird thing is that the Monday before I left I was allowed to do my laundry. Then the following week p-day got moved to Thanksgiving which is why some of you got the e-mail from Sister Connolly saying I wouldn't be able to write you all until then. Then the weird thing about that is that we were allowed to e-mail because the Family HIstory Center would have been closed on Thanksgiving which is why Ryan got the e-mail from me on Monday.

 Despite the fact that my e--mail account has been set-up I would still like letters and real mail and I'm still probably going to write letters. The reason why is because I only get an hour to read e-mails, write my e-mail to you all and e-mail President Beck. Yeah that time goes by really fast! When it comes to letters though I get more time to both read and write those. I wrote letters to some of you on Thanksgiving and you'll probably get them some time this week.

Elder Mortimer and I have been sifting a lot of wheat from the tares this week. We've dropped like seven people because they simply aren't progressing. We met our contacting goal and contacted 149 people! This has never happened before and we are sooooooo happy! Each day seems to drag and also act as an emotional rollercoaster. One of our investigators is a girl named "Aussie" Cooper. She's 14, shy and the daughter of one of our recent converts. She has a piercing on her lip and we're working on teaching her about that. She's slowly, but surely, progressing which is a blessing to us considering how everybody else drops like flies or cancels their appointments.Her baptismal date is on December 18th and we are confident that she'll be ready by then.

We're also teaching this awesome family know as the Valdez family. The mother, Frances, was found by my companion and his former companion while tracting. She seems really gung-ho about the Gospel, which of course is fabulous. She basically said that she wants to be baptized, she just wants to know more about our church first. She has three daughters: Jennifer (18), Tania (14) and Emma (5). Neither of her two teenage daughters seem as gung-ho about the Gospel as she does, although Jennifer said she felt the Spirit (after we explained that to her) and liked what she felt. Her problem is that she works all the time so it's hard for us to find a time to teach the entire family. The Valdez family came to church yesterday, which we were very excited about. The father, Edson, only started joined our last lesson and he liked what he heard and he came to church too. They'll get baptized, we just need to keep teaching them.

Thanksgiving was interesting. We played a lot of basketball which tired me out because I am super out of shape. We went shopping and I was pleased with the fact that I only had to spend $8 on food. Most of everything I get comes for free anyway so being thrifty doesn't seem like much of a problem. President Beck initiated a new rule that we had to have a less active member or an investigator at our dinner appointment or else we couldn't have one. I thought that that rule would kill off our dinner appointments, but we've gotten quite a few. We don't get them everyday and often go back to the Connolly's for dinner, but there are people willing to feed us. On Thanksgiving Elder Mortimer drew the most awesome looking ghetto turkey I've ever seen. Seriously it had awesome shades, a University of Utah hat and a nice gun with some serious bop-boppage.

I've gotten all of your letters and I LOVE IT! It usually takes about 7-11 days for it to arrive to me. I love reading all your letters and I would encourage everyone to continue writing actual letters to me. There's just an awesome rush that I get from getting mail. Not that e-mailing is bad, I just like letters and packages. Thank you all for your love and support. I just simply can't thank you enough for your love. I feel it and am strengthened by it.

Love,

Elder Boothe