August 8th l

Howdy Parents,

Well it sounds like your week was a hit, and so much happening!!! The family reunion sounds like it went very well. I don't know a whole lot about that side of the family because the first family reunion you guys did in 35 years happened to be during the 2 year interval that I was on a mission, how does that happen? Maybe one day we will have another one and I will be able to go to it and meet some of that family.

How does it feel? You finally have no kids at home! I'm really happy for Maren and Andy it will be way sweet for them to get out and have some new experiences together. How much did you two cry? You don't have to answer I already know - you guys are such babies. I hope they end up liking their new ward, and hopefully they won't be called into the nursery, that would just be a bummer.

I can't believe you two learned how to use skype, that is just funny. I remember the first time I got a text message from mom, I was shocked, now look, you are using an i-pad and talking to people face to face through the internet. I wonder what new trick you are going to learn next.

As for those questions, Nobody really went anywhere in my zone except Elder Black, and he moved in (he just came from Nong Khai), but that is pretty much it. The people in my group that are Zone Leaders are Elder Furr Elder McDonald and me. This is pretty cool because out of our group the three of us got along best, and we all love BYU. They both went to BYU before their mission and they beg me every time they see me to go there with them when we get home. Personally, I think that would be fun, but I don't think there is any chance in the world that I would be able to get in there.

Something happened this last week which was interesting, the Thai government has been giving us some grief lately about our visas (we have working visas and they think that we aren't working). So as we were going in on Thursday to renew them, a bunch of us had our renewals denied. I'm pretty excited to see what happens with that. Since last week I haven't heard anything about it, but I think we are going to have to change the type of visas that we use. anyway that is pretty much the only interesting thing that happened last week.

I'm pretty excited this Thursday is the Zone Conference, it should be pretty easy and straight forward but we don't get to choose the lessons that we will teach. President Smith told us that we have to train on "teaching people not lessons.” We are also going to do a mock baptismal interview to train people on how to prepare people for baptism. Other than those we don't have to doing anything else, so it should be fairly simple.

I love you guys. thanks so much for your letters. I hope you have a good week.

The movies are Men in Black and Dr. Doolittle – what in the world could the theme be? I think as time goes on I'm getting worse and worse at this game, plus I haven't seen Dr Doolittle in like 10 years. It couldn't possible be something with a talking dog could it?