Congratulations Jared!

Today was Jared's Eagle Court of Honor. He held it jointly with Spencer Jensen and Zach Yoshikawa. Here are some pictures we took. Congratulations Jared!




(Note how much shorter Jared is than Clyde Maughan.)

Make Hay While The Sun Shines...

You've heard the phrase, "Make hay while the sun shines." Well, what do you do when the sun doesn't shine? Today we're having a small blizzard and so Lauren decided it was time to go cross-country skiing! You can see from the pictures how hard it was snowing. Looks like we'll have about 7" by the time it's over. With more coming on Sunday it's safe to say we'll be having a White Christmas!

Yes, That blur is Lauren...

I should also say that after more than an hour of skiing, the skis came off and she took the snowboard out! Now if only we had some hills in our yard.

We were Secret Santa-ed

Monday night about 6:00 p.m. the door bell rang. We went to see who was there and found this:
There was a note attached that let us know that we were the 3rd Day of Christmas and that this was "Three English Toffees" from someone doing the Twelve Days of Christmas. It was fun.

So if you're out there reading this and it was from you - you should know that you couldn't have picked a candy we love more! Thanks - and Merry Christmas!

We Survived the Ice Storm of 2008

As many of you already know the Northeast was hit with an ice storm which brought down tons of tree limbs onto power lines. Many were without power until Monday, and I hear some places still don't have power back. We were one of the few "lucky" ones. We were like an island of power surrounded by the great sea of black. We did have three or four really large branches fall down off our pine tree. One of them just missed our neighbor's truck. We also had a large oak branch fall onto the driveway which prevented us from getting out of the garage until it got cut up. But after a small mishap with a chain saw (no worries - no one got hurt, it just got pinned in a branch and we couldn't free it for awhile) and a Saturday morning of back breaking work (thanks Glen and Dave) we were OK. More than half of our ward was without power. And it was hard checking on people because many people now have internet phones that don't work without power. Cell phones did help a lot. On Saturday we had a Stake Choir rehearsal and driving there was like being in Narnia with the Ice Queen. It was incredibly beautiful. Fortunately most people had their power back on by Sunday night, but it was a cold time to be without power. It made me realize that we need to do more to be prepared for this type of thing, should it happen again.

You can see how the ice caused the trees to bend, if not break.

Glen took this shot Saturday night. The ice really was as beautiful as it was destructive.