1 January 2017

Happy new year mum! New Year's Eve looked fun! There is an awesome Chinese place here called Lincoln Chinese, a pretty standard name haha. There are a few good places to eat, we don't eat out a ton here though. There is this really good Mexican place called El Portel. We go there once in a while. Yeah the members feed us every night.  There are a few nights where we don't have a dinner but they are really good about feeding us. We are teaching a little brother and sister, she is 11 and he is 14, they are awesome! They are being baptized this Saturday! I'm excited for them. They were already on date when I got here so it's not like I got them to this point or anything but it's been cool to be a part of it. There is this really cool less active family we visit pretty frequently. We do all sorts of stuff with them. We are going to do this cool art project thing. I'm not sure how to describe it so I'll just send pictures when we do it! No real investigators here though. We decided to make a goal for this new year, just Elder Cobabe and I, to find more people to teach, and getting members to help us find them. After dinner we share a spiritual message with the family that fed us dinner and we've been inviting them to invite a non-member friend over for dinner when we come next. I'm excited to see what will happen!

I'm so glad you went up to see granddaddy. It sounds like he wasn't doing very well. It made me sad to read some of that. But I'm am so thankful you are telling me what is happening. I'm glad you aren't sugar coating things. I'm proud of the girls for calling and texting everyone to cancel the Boxing Day party. I remember at home I never wanted to call people haha. I'm also thankful for Diane! She always seems to say things pretty straight forward, (whether good or bad) and on this occasion it really helped. That's cute that the girls made Riley's birthday cake haha!

My dark year ended yesterday. The dark year is the full year in the mission field. I spent all of 2016 in California. I now can say I go home this year. It's pretty crazy. I get to see you guys in 9 months. I bet I'll be home to see granddaddy as well. This year, and these last 9 months I'm going to really try to be better. Not that I've been bad necessarily, but there's always little things I can work on. I think that's when the real change comes. I'm going to try to change. I'm excited. I miss you guys and love you so much. I'm so glad you and Mikey went up to see granddad. I'm sure it gave him a spiritual boost as well as a physical one. I love you guys!

Elder Yule

Elder Yule, Elder Cobabe, President Marston