November 8

Hi guys -- no need to apologize about the email being brief, it's okay.  Sounds like you guys are pretty busy right now.  I'm glad that you and Clarissa got to bare your testimonies.
Sorry bout the laundry bit, its quite a pain in the butt, hopefully I will be able to work around it somehow soon and not have it be such a problem.  Thanks for doing that for me though, it really helps me out.  I will get right on to getting my perscription filled a.s.a.p. so it doesn't become a problem.
Another thing while I am thinking about it, you know how back home with you guys almost everybody has their own gardening tools? well out here almost everybody has gardeners and almost no tools!!  when we went to do some service we had to go through a large part of the ward list before we found anyone who had any gardening tools (I was almost tempted to think that it would have been easier to have gotten some small gardening tools before coming out here!) but we worked it out in the end and so it was okay.
Things are going pretty well out here.  Me and my companion get along okay, he and I just have a few things that we bump shoulders on but hopefully with time and a little getting to know one another better those issues will fade, he's a great guy.  He's got a lot of great qualities, he has been out quite a long time, he goes home in about two months and so he is getting kind of "trunky" and all that, I mean he's not extremely trunky but it is kind of obvious that he is pretty anxious about it.  but he is still working very hard as a missionary, and so there's no problems or concerns there.
We are teaching some really cool people here, a few part member families mostly, funny thing about that the statistics of our mission showed that the majority of the baptisms we have each year, especially the ones that stay active in the church, come from member referrals and/or part-member families.  The ward is doing really great with the missionary work the bishop is really missionary minded and he helps us out a lot.
Something else just fyi we recently had a pretty cool zone conference a week or so ago, our district was asked to sing a special musical number near the end and we sang a remix version of "Nearer My God to Thee" I'll tell you more about that latter but it was kind of fun.  The cool thing that I want to tell you guys about was that the building we had our conference in was a stake center that had two meeting halls! it was very nice and it kind of threw me for a loop considering that I never saw one like that back in utah, I took a pic for you guys and it's attached to the email.  We had our temple trip today, since we are in the northern part of the mission we go to the newport beach temple there should also be a picture of that atached too, so thats everything thats going on out here.
I should be able to get those letters I promised sent to you guys soon thanks for all your love and prayers and all you've done to help me.

LATER;-}
Elder Edward C.D. Parker

P.S.: how's it going with those shirts? and whats the price for 32-34 slacks over there? prices for them over here are up in the 20-30 range and 20's the cheapest I have seen at the places I have been to.