Dad’s Weekly Report

More on the blizzard here.  It looks like it has finally ended.  The thermometer is reading 38.8 degrees and they are predicting rain and temperatures in the 40’s tonight and tomorrow.   We had quite a heavy snow on Christmas in the early afternoon.  3-5 inches fell in a short time.  The pile of snow on the east side of our driveway got to be 5-6 feet tall.  Here is a picture of it.

23 December 2008

Dear Family,

Greetings from the snowy Northwest. This past week we have had a blizzard here. They say it is the worst blizzard for 40 years. Today we are supposed to be traveling to Pullman to have Christmas with Brent and Allen. However they just opened the road, I-84, this morning. It has been closed for three days and they are still requiring chains on the road. So we wimped out and are staying home for Christmas. We will find a weekend in January and go there. So the boys will get their Christmas presents late. I hope that they will forgive us.

We have been hunkered down and mostly staying inside. Friday we went out and delivered Christmas goodies to friends. Then the snow started coming down in earnest and it got cold. It has been I the 20’s since then. We got some freezing rain on Saturday and church was cancelled as well as the Stake Christmas music program for the second week. I guess we won’t be doing it at all this year after all that practicing.

Yesterday I put the chains on the car and ventured out to Wal-Mart and picked up our family photos. Hopefully we will be able to get them mailed today. We didn’t get mail on Saturday or Monday. What ever happened to, “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” We also haven’t got a newspaper since Saturday.

In order to get out of the house and get some air, we shoveled our driveway and sidewalk a few times. The snow just keeps coming down. I see it just started snowing again. We have about a foot of snow on the ground now. About 2/3 the way down there is a ¼ inch layer of ice from the freezing rain. Here is a picture of me on the driveway. The pile of snow behind me is now twice as high.

Yesterday evening we invited our close neighbors, Ken and Sharon Whiting to walk over and have dinner and then we played dominos. I think I will call the Grahams’s and see if we can come over tonight and play games. (We are kind of getting cabin fever.)

I have a bunch of letters from me to my dad that I sent him while he was in Saudi Arabia. Sandy told me that I ought to get them organized. They are written on legal size paper and so I decided the best way was to re-type them into a word file then I could print them easier. I pulled them out and typed them up on Saturday. I was feeling pretty good about getting them done till Sandy showed me that I only had about ¼ of them. She pulled out the rest and there is a pretty big stack still to do. The ones I typed covered 1983 and half of 1984. It was fun to read about when Wes and Ruth were young and Lyle was still a baby. Wes wrote his name in one of them, his first signature. Here it is. Good job Wes.

While we have had the cold weather Sandy has asked me almost every night to build a fire in our fireplace. So I have been cutting up a bunch of old wood that I have in the garage. Most of it is plywood and particle board, small pieces that I have had left over from projects and from the shelves I tore down in the garage. I have an ulterior motive for burning it. I got about $300 from HP as a bonus for working there 30 years. I want to use the money to buy a new toy. I want to buy a band-saw. The stack of wood that we are burning is in the place that I want to put the saw. So I need to get rid of it. I think that 3-4 more fires will have it gone. I have been looking on Craig’s List and see several good ones. When the snow clears out in January I will get serious about buying one.

Well that is all the news for this week. I hope that your Christmas is jolly great fun.

Love,

John

Dear Family,

Today is a blustery day. We are supposed to get snow for the first time this winter. So far no snow. Tonight is the stake Christmas music program. I have been practicing with the stake choir for a couple of months. I hope that the snow doesn’t stop the program. This place doesn’t handle snow very well. There are a few reasons. First we don’t get much snow and so people aren’t used to it. Also it is always wet here in the winter so if it ever gets below freezing the wet turns to ice and it gets slippery. Lastly we have almost no flat land here. None of the roads are level, you are either driving up or down which makes slippery roads more dangerous. Anyway I am hoping that we only get a little and it doesn’t shut down the roads. I guess less people will come to the program at least.

Lyle and Emily left on Friday. We will so miss them. Lyle is a good son but Emily is just a pleasure to be around. They drove to Salt Lake on Friday via Rexburg and are holed up there waiting for a storm to pass before they continue on to New York. The house will feel pretty big and lonely now. We will rent out the apartment instead of trying to sell the house as the housing market is pretty bad here as it is everywhere.

We have been preparing for Christmas. I helped Sandy mail out packages yesterday and we just about have our Christmas letters ready to mail. Sandy has been really doing most of the work. I helped her buy a few presents and I bought a couple of presents for her. She asked for dress for Christmas. I looked in 4 stores so far and no one has any dresses that she would be willing to wear.

Yesterday was a special Christmas program at the fort. I went to a stake choir practice early then went to the fort at 10AM and stayed until afternoon. There were lots of visitors and I mostly made nails and gave them away to the kids. I need to get a new project. So if there is anything that you want forged please let me know. Here is a picture of my two most recent projects. We have a grow light over this plant and I built the stand under it in order to get the plant closer to the light. I made the fork last week. I am not sure what I will do with the fork. I will ask the kitchen at the fort if they can use it.

Sandy will be joining Lyle & Emily’s Primary class with hers for the rest of the year and so I have been recruited to help teach and run crowd control. So I will be going to Primary for the next couple of weeks.

I started this letter before church. Now I am home from church. They told us to go home at the start of the third hour so I didn’t get to help with the Primary class. It snowed pretty good for an hour or so but it is so cold that the snow is dry and blowing around. So the roads are not slick at all.

Well that is all the news this week. Take care.

Love,

John