Reigning Dogs and Cats

Dear Family and Friends,

There are some very important things I forgot to mention last week. First, I ate at In-N-Out for the first time. If that's how you spell it. The fries were kind of weird, and the burgers not super impressive, but the shakes were good.

We have the coveted mission car up here, a Mazda 3. Which is good because we have lots of windy roads, and many, many dirt roads. I have also discovered that many of the roads which are on our map do not actually exist. Instead they are driveways which people have chosen to name, but which they have not placed signs on. While this is all in good fun, in fact it gave me a few ideas in regards to our own driveway, it makes choosing streets for tracting the night before rather difficult. So far none of the streets I have chosen have proven very profitable. But as we only tract for an hour each day, that is not so bad. Most of our time is spent visiting less active members and part member families, or still trying to meet the ward and encourage them to give referrals. Did you know that by increasing member referrals by 2.7 each month (ie ward members give missionaries 5 referrals a month) we could easily double baptisms per President Hinckley's request? Our mission's goal is to baptize 800 people this year. So far we're falling short. Alas.

As I mentioned we're kind of in the boonies. In that everyone and their cat has a dog. And if you are at all worth your salt, you have two or better yet five. Plus a bird, 6 cats, a ferret or two, and goats, horses, and/or llamas. Yes there are a surprising number of llamas and alpacas up here. Who knew? The exception here is Sister Burton (who is 88) and has one 22 year old cat named Tom. Unfortunately not all these dogs are friendly, which makes tracting fun. Also almost all the dogs want to get dirt and saliva on our clothes, which makes us more interesting/confusing to all other dogs we see that day. But the work is good. We have about 7-8 investigators right now. Much to our dissappointment we discovered that two of the investigators we were ready to pick up last Tuesday turned out to be extremely inactive members who seem to have forgotten many principles of our church. For instance, one is meant to attend church. Also you are supposed to move your records with you when you relocate. And thirdly, oh yes that we do believe in the Book of Mormon. LeRoy is older (50s or so) and grew up active, but his son Jeremy is about 29 and though he was baptised when he was 8 he knows just about nothing about our church. We're going to go see them again tomorrow.

This week is zone conference, so we had to spiff up the car thus very little time to write. More about the streets of Palo Cedro next week.

Sister Sorensen