P-Day Email October 17, 2011

Dear family,

It's once again great to here from you all. Every letter was something I needed to hear. Sorry I didn't give any pictures with my last email, I forgot my camera so I was not able to attach any, but I will with this one. To answer your question Michelle, no I have not received a package as of yet, but if you sent it through fed ex, or ups, then if it has arrived, I won't get it until I there is a zlc because apparently they can't forward those packages on to our address and the zone leaders have to pick them up and bring them to us personally. If it's the us postal service, they can forward it to my address, but I don't know what you used. The fall colors here are beautiful, although kind of interspersed because of all the evergreens that are around here. The mountains around here are quite beautiful as well, but nothing, in my opinion, compared with the wasatch mountains. We've had a couple of beautiful days, but now it's starting to get really cold, it got below 30 last night.../cry. I have to admit I didn't expect that by going toSpokane that I would be going to the redneck capital of the world, or a close suburb at the very least. I ate dinner with some members yesterday, who (absolutely great people they are) are the epidemy of a redneck. their kitchen and dining room is located in a metal warehouse in the middle of the forest, which still has a working garage that they could open as a wall of their kitchen, and all their rooms are located in trailers and campers at various locations around their property. Their kitchen tables reminded me of what a military mess hall might look like. I have also realized that the old lady who died of a heart attack walking a mile from her mailbox (in that old mormon video that may have even been called the mailbox, but i don't remembe) to her house probably lived somewhere near Chewelah because every other driveway around here is literally about a half mile long. despite the redness of the place, I do love it, and I do love the people here. We are still working on the Ukrainian children, but we think we are going to take a slight detour from trying to teach the lessons and teach a couple lessons on respecting other people and the 5th commandment. This week we taught a less active family who had a dog that looked exactly like Rocky. This dog was so funny to watch because when nobody would play with her, she would take her ball over to a blanket and hide it in the blanket as well as she could, then try to dig it back out again. She must have done this at least a dozen times. I am really sad to here about Rocky. I'm just glad I wasn't around when all this happened because I think I would have broken down watching him in that condition. It was hard for me just to read about it. I was glad to hear that he got at least a couple minutes of happiness before the end. I'd like to think that is because God cares about all of his creations and even though Rocky wasn't a person, he cared enough about even him to give him a little peace before the end. Well I'm gonna go now, but I just wanna say that I love you all, and I pray for you every day.

Love,

Elder Stacey