January in Ohio

Hi dear friends and family,

Our Apartment In February

What a winter we have had.   Started early in December and has continued through Feb.   We were told it was suppose to be a hard winter and it has been.   We have had so much snow.   We have had a couple of warm spells after the 1st two big storms that brought rain and melted all the snow but this last bunch that came the 1st of Feb has stayed so far.   If the other two big storms had not melted before we got this last one we would be buried in snow.   As it is we have a hard time getting around and many places you can't get into because of the deep snow.    But we have managed to stay safe.   We made it through the polor vortex or whatever they called that cold spell in January without much problem.   We had several days when we had to stay in and we had 3 weeks of no church activities except church on Sunday.   We never had that cancelled but in one place they had to cancel Sacrament meeting 6 times this winter.   

We opened the door and...

My biggest problem this year so far has been my feet.   A month ago I pulled my Achilles tendon and it has really caused me a lot of pain especially as I am always walking on snowpacked snow and rough areas that make it worse.   I have been in a walking cast for a month now and will be until the snow is gone.   Then hopefully I can go back to shoes.

Because of the weather and my feet we have not been out as much as usual and so have done a lot of telephone visiting.   We still do service for people and go with the young missionaries as much as possible.   The Sister Missionaries live next door to us and we have 2 real fun sisters right now.  We don't go with the 2 Elders we have now as much as we have with others.   They don't seem to want to use us which is okay because the sisters do.

Missionary work is slow here.   We work with a lot of inactives but don't see much change or even a real desire in most of them.   We have several investigators that we are working with but they are progressing slow.

Can't believe that we have been out nearly a year.   Only 6 months to go.   It sure has gone fast.  We will be home before we know it.

Take care all of you and keep in touch and hope to see you this fall.

Love,     Elder and Sister Banks

Since we can't hang anything on the wall, we have hung our grandkids on grandpa's ties over a door.