I Don't Believe in Tough Areas

Today Elder Goodale didn't write a general single update e-mail to us, but rather, sent Michelle and I separate, shorter e-mails addressing things she and I had written to him about earlier. Publicly-sharable snippets from those are as follows:
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Dear Dad:

Thanks for all the sports updates! It's good to know that everyone starts winning after I leave... (Lakers, Angels, BSU...)

Also thank you for the political update. It's good to know what's going on in the world. To an extent. Sounds like I'm glad I don't know too much right now. I'm glad I'm not part of the world right now. I especially can't believe the idiocy of giving Obama the Nobel Peace Prize for accomplishing NOTHING! Oh well, it's not like that prize means anything anyway...

That's so sweet that they dedicated the new building. Now you can walk to church! It's crazy because they hadn't even broken ground for it when I left. And now you're going to church there. Crazy. But that's weird that you were having meetings there for a month before it was dedicated. I didn't think that you could do that. How does that work?

And the e-mail to Michelle:

Dear Mom:

You had asked some questions the last couple weeks that I hadn't responded to, so I thought I'd answer those... Mainly why missionaries were pulled out of Stockton. Nothing bad had happened, per se, one of the missionaries had just had some health problems. It wasn't like the situation when I went to Ava, where the work was so dead that they had to shotgun it to get things going again. Although because of the fact that there hadn't been missionaries here for a month there wasn't a whole lot going on here either... but enough. Supposedly that's also because this is a "tough area" from what we hear (even from what President Merkley told us), but I haven't seen that. I don't believe in tough areas. :)

But as far as the other missionaries go, one of them had some health problems and had to go home (he had only been out a couple of weeks) and the other missionary was supposed to go home at the end of the transfer so they decided to just bring him to Tulsa for his last 3-4 weeks and put him in a three-some there. When they pulled out the previous missionaries they had every intention of putting missionaries back in as soon as transfers came around.

Thanks so much for giving me that update on the other missionaries from the ward. It's good to know that the others are all safe and sound, hopefully everybody heals up soon.

Our Zone Bottom: Ewert, Hancock, Corrow, Sister and Pres. Merkley, ? Top: Conrad ?? Black, Taggard, Begay, Scholle, Rittel, Raleigh, Robinson, Schofield, Moxon, Me