Many are called but few are frozen (Dec 14)

Boy am I lucky to be one of the elect few in that case.
Dang it.
Yes, it has been absolutely miserably cold this week. And it's technically not that bad for here. Nor should i really complain because there's always somewhere that's worse. But, it's cold.
Elder McConnel is from Boise, Idaho, and handles himself just fine in the snow while driving. So no worries, mom!
The snow and cold, and the fact that Iowa was hit the worst out of any state, led to us being told to stay inside tuesday night. Well, Elder McConnel and I had an appointment with one of our main investigators that lived about ten minutes away, and we got the news to stay in half an hour or so before the appointment. So, we took the matter to President Talbot and got it approved to go as long as we were positive we'd be safe. Luckily, a member from the branch drove who is from northern Minnesota and had an SUV, so he drove. I've never seen a near-whiteout going sideways. Anyway, that's probably more news than you wanted to know, Mom. The next day our cars were grounded so we were made to only walk. THAT stunk, since we live on the edge of town (Literally. We're on the corner of 8th and CITY LIMITS Road). So we walked to our Branch Mission Leaders house and used that as our base to head out and do stuff. We mostly just went and shoveled some sidewalks that day. By the way, you know it's bad when a midwest town cancels school due to weather. But it was sunny that day, and not too terrible, just in the single digits or so, plus a ten mile an hour or so breeze. Plus I was bundled up really well. I wore sunglasses, too. Big mistake. Our branch mission leader thought i looked like the unibomber. But, yeah, it was cold. Especially that night when we walked home. Elder McConnel and I had to check each others faces for frost bite. Not to mention that a conman of a duck caused us to try to free it from the ice just to find out it wasn't stuck anyway. Most people think we're crazy for being out in the cold tracting. But we gotta, can't cut out on the work just for some cold. But we do have a chart that keeps track of temp and wind speed and lets us know how fast we'll get frost bite, and we'll definitely come in if we need to. We went disc golfing in the snow again this morning. Today was very freakin cold. But at least we had spray painted my white discs read, so we didn't lose them as much.

This week, strangely enough, despite the cold, was mostly spent finding. And with all of our searching we only set up two return appointments. But we taught like six lessons to members and had about that many meals fed to us. It was great.

Keep warm, everybody. I'm trying my best....
Elder Gates