Another week in paradise?

Another letter from the tropical paradise of Apple Valley, CA!  A few days ago it rained all day.  It must've been about 50 degrees!  I remember thinking how cold it was, haha.  Summer in Utah and Fall in California has made me soft.  That and the fact that I pretty much only have short sleeve white shirts, haha.  It's good, though.  Biking in the cold rain in a white shirt and tie makes me feel like a real missionary out here.  The only downside is that when the weather gets colder there are less people on the street so it's harder to contact people.

Today has been a really good week as far as the Work of Salvation goes.  We have added four new investigators to our teaching pool!  Carlos, a young father working at a grocery store to support his four children, and Brandy, Eric, and their daughter who is over the age of 8.  They've been taking the discussions in Nebraska for a while and they just moved here and got in contact with us.  Our teaching pool is growing and every day we get more and more appointments.  It's fantastic!

Since Halloween is coming up we taught one of our investigators how to hold a family home evening.  Elder Escamilla and I went over to her house and we carved pumpkins with her family.  I'll make sure to send pictures of my awesome CTR pumpkin.  It's pretty much the best.

We had the opportunity to attend a Bishop Youth Discussion with all the Young Men and Young Women in our ward last night.  It was great because there was a ton of food and Elder Escamilla and I had been fasting all day, haha.

One of the people that we've been teaching is a boy named Nykolus who is 8 years old.  His dad wants him to hear all the missionary discussions before he makes the decision to be baptized.  We've found that as we teach him he makes a lot of comparisons to school and how church feels like schoool.  We're trying to make the gospel more applicable in his life.  We started to tell him some Book of Mormon stories and when we asked him if those sound like stories he'd like to read he seemed really interested.  We asked him to read the story of Ammon when he defends the king's sheep (which is about 7 pages of dense, scriptural reading) and when we saw him at church three days later he told us that he had read the whole thing!  I am cautiously optimistic that one day when he's an apostle he will tell the story of the kind missionaries that taught him how to love the Book of Mormon, haha.

Well, even though it's P-Day there's still a lot of work to do here in California.  It's great hearing from you whenever you get the chance and every missionary loves to get mail.


 I'll leave you all with a lyric from the song "Mormon Daddy" by the group Sons of Provo:

"I'm a dilly whack mack Mormon Daddy,
Yo, my peeps all be conformin' cause it's cool to be a Mormon

I'm a blackjack saint, I'm a mack daddy oh."

Your dilly whack mack Mormon Daddy,

Elder Carter David Mormon

PS:  Carter mentioned that he would love to get some "real" letters if anyone has the time:-)  His address is:

Elder Carter Morgan

6541 Woodruff Place, 

Rancho Cucamonga, CA, 91710.