The forecast for yesterday said one to three inches. We got a dusting. The forecast for today was occasional snow showers. We got an inch. Along with the snow came the very cold air from Canada. Our high today was 25 degrees and tomorrow it will be about 20 degrees. It’s about time to pull the snowblower out of it’s storage space and put the lawnmower away. Winter has definitely arrived.

Christmas is also looming. Tonight Nina pulled out some boxes of Christmas decorations, put up a tree, and is starting to do some decorating. We’ll soon also look festive!

Saturday morning Nina and I visited with my sister Eileen (link to her blog is on the right). After that we stopped by my Aunt Marj’s apartment to say hello. We had a very nice visit with her. She seems to be settled into her assisted living facility and was quite positive about the place, the staff, and her accomodations. We were quite impressed with the facility. It smells good, is well maintained, and very spacious. Eileen is doing a very good job of taking care of Aunt Marj and definitely had found a very good facility for her. Good job, Eileen!

Heather did herself proud as well. Along with her sister Jaelene, they put together Thanksgiving dinner for twenty-two people. I’ve put some pictures on the picture album. Thanks you, Heather, for a very nice time. We enjoyed our time there!

Colten and Jackson were very excited to sleep in our RV. They were so funny about the whole thing. It was fun to visit with them out in the camper. They are great kids. Thanks, Jaelene, for making that possible as well.

We had a very nice Thanksgiving holiday. I’m so not ready to go back to work!

We decided to bring the motorhome down to Heather’s for Thanksgiving. Nina drove down Wednesday mid-day and I brought the motorhome down last night after work. There were a couple of interesting incidents yesterday that I decided were blog worthy.

On the way down I stopped at a gas station / convenience store in Tremonton, Utah to make a “pit stop”. The fellow standing at the urinal next to me asked me, “How do you flush this thing?” I told him to take two steps back…. He did and the little red light did it’s job and the urinal flushed. “Well, I’ll be d*mned!” he exclaimed. He had to try it two more times — up and back and sure enough, it flushed each time. I didn’t have the opportunity to check his license plate to find out what planet he came from. Welcome to the big city!

What’s a pit stop without picking up some licorice? As I was standing at the checkout counter the clerk asked the fellow she was ringing up, “How’s that new baby?” He replied, “She’s a real Butterball. Same size as the turkey we’re eating tomorrow.”

Before I left I stopped at Albertson’s Grocery Store to pick up some batteries for the walkie talkies we use for Nina to direct me backing the RV into Heather’s driveway. As I was walking down the aisle in the grocery store, I overheard a fellow answering a store employee’s question. The somewhat dumpy-looking forty-something fellow said, “We met at a McDonalds. Six hours later we decided we could get along. We’ve been together for seven years now,” as he pointed to a forty-something woman who might have passed for his twin. Sounds like a made-for-tv love story!

We’ve had a nice Thanksgiving. Pictures and commentary coming Real Soon Now.

Sunday we drove over to Soda Springs for the afternoon and evening. Jim, LeeAnn, and family arrived around 6 p.m. for the night. We had dinner and drove back to Pocatello. Jim and crew stayed the night with mom and dad in Soda Springs and drove over here on Monday afternoon. We’ve had a great visit with them.

We would be delighted to be closer to grandkids. However, as our kids have all pointed out, we keep moving…. So, when we do get a chance we like to spoil them as much as possible. They grow up so very fast! Welcome to Pocatello, gang!

My Treo 650 phone gave up the ghost this afternoon. I can probably go a few days without that cell phone (I have a company-issued Blackberry cell phone…), but the thing I use the phone for the most is to play FreeCell. It gives me something to do with my hands when I’m just sitting around. I have to send the phone off to Texas for either repair or replacement. Palm One says that they’ll have it back in about five business days. That suggests replacement with a factory repaired model. The lady on the help line from Palm One was very helpful and quite efficient.

It’s been a pretty good Saturday and a very good football day. There were enough floaties that the hot tub needed the water replaced. I picked up a pump from the hot tub vendor yesterday after work and got the water replaced last night. I needed to return the pump this morning. After that I went by the Church Distribution Center to pick up thirty November Ensigns for Nina to take to the prison. I’d like to upgrade the web server I’m running, so I stopped by the used computer store. There wasn’t anything there that looked like it would fit my requirement so I’ll do some shopping on eBay. I have two servers — one is used inside my network for name resolution and testing software. It’s also a backup server if something happens to the web server. The other server is the actual web server. They’re both Pentium III 450mhz systems. I’d like to bring them up to Pentium IV around 1ghz. I’ll upgrade the software to Suse Linux 10 (currently running Suse 9). The upgrade is more for reliability purposes rather than anything else … it shouldn’t make much difference for web users.

After getting home I decided to try out a Windex window washing process similar to what the car wash places use to wash the windows. It seems to have worked pretty well. We haven’t washed the windows since we’ve been in the house and some of them were very dirty. They look much better, but not as good as washing them by hand. I need a taller step ladder to do that. The rest of the day has been spent doing little things inside the house and watching football. Purdue successfully defended the Oaken Bucket. Ohio State survived Michigan. Rutgers may well get beaten (the score is 17-3 late in the 3rd quarter with Rutgers losing to Cincinnati who is poised to score yet again). USC is getting roughed up by California at the half and I’m busy switching back and forth between these two games. I enjoy college football!

Nina has been in a baking mode today. That’s always very good. Homemade sandwich rolls, dinner rolls for Thursday, chocolate chip cookies, and other great stuff. Delicious!

Tomorrow we’ll go to Soda Springs for the afternoon. Jim, LeeAnn, and family have been in Logan the past few days for LeeAnn’s parent’s fiftieth wedding anniversary. They’ll be in Soda Springs tomorrow night, then here for a couple of nights. Hurrah!

Nina decided to go to Idaho Falls to the temple today. She was originally going to leave quite early and do three session, but the day started cold and wet with occasional snow, so she decided to wait until it was daylight. Even though I usually come home for lunch, when she’s at the temple I need to come home to let Bradica (the dog) out. Now that we have the automatic feeder, she gets fed on time whether I’m there precisely at noon or not. Anyhow, when I let her out, I noticed a lot of smoke coming up from the hills to the west of us. I got my camera and took several pictures, including this one where the fire is quite visible. They were probably doing some kind of a controlled burn (but there was nothing about it in the newspaper). This is probably a good time to do the burn — it certainly won’t get out of control!

We’ve had much cooler weather with little storm systems going by about every other day. The ski resorts are happy — all of them should be open by Thanksgiving. I guess winter is fast becoming a reality.

Union Pacific Railroad announced last week that they were going to hire about a hundred more people here in Pocatello. That’s another sign the economy here is picking up. The mood, however, of most people I’ve talked to is one of concern. The elections were one of the signals of the frustration people are feeling. The economy is picking up but the cost of the war in Iraq is putting a real damper on people’s spirit. It’s not only the money being spent, but the human cost as well.

It’s now time to start thinking about Christmas. Within the next week or so, I’ll be asked what I’d like for Christmas. I don’t know now and will not know then. Socks would be good….

I’ve had a home page on Earthlink for quite a few years which gets almost no traffic. I last updated that web page about four years ago. It’s a very difficult web site to maintain. Everything has to be built in native HTML (the arcane language of web pages) and the web pages are then uploaded using File Transfer Protocol (FTP), another fairly arcane method. About the only thing useful on that Earthlink web page were some links to stories from my family history. This is information that others in my family might be interested in. So, I decided to also populate these stories on my website where they might get a bigger audience. The link is on the right side of the page.

I downloaded some Wiki software from pmwiki.org. Wiki’s are web pages that generally look like other web pages, but which can be edited by anyone who has the appropriate privileges. As these web pages are set up, anyone can read them. A password is needed to edit them. Anyone who wants can have the password (send me an email and I’ll send you the password). Also, if anyone wants to add new pages, they are also welcome to do so. Send me and email and I’ll send the password. Writing stuff on the Wiki is quite easy and doesn’t require any understanding of HTML!

Now that the few stories that I have are now on the wiki, I’ll think about how this should be organized. I think I want to add some of my own rememberances (some are fading!!), hopefully without embarrasing anyone too much. But, the current organization doesn’t lend itself to that activity. Suggestions are always welcome.

It’s Sunday afternoon — a bright, clear, and cold day. Yesterday was supposed to be our first major winter storm. I think it stormed in a few places around, but in reality it was pretty much a bust here in Pocatello. The morning started with rain and snow. Light rain continued for much of the day, but the promised snow never materialized. All of that is unfortunate because we were going to drive over to Green River, Wyoming, for a baptism. My sister-in-law’s granddaughter was being baptized in Rock Springs. The original plan was for mom and dad to ride over with us. First, mother came down with the flu and dad picked up a cold, so they had to cancel. Then the weather forecasters painted a major doom-and-gloom forecast. Saturday morning seemed to validate the forecast, but by mid-day it was clear the storm was not going to happen. A couple of places between here and Green River did indeed get quite a bit of snow, but that would not have been a problem. Sorry, Perry and Chris: We could have been there after all. Hindsight clearly says so. I hope that the ceremony went well and that your granddaughter had a nice day.

The other event of the weekend was our Stake Conference. This was a regional meeting this time. Each stake had their own Saturday meetings. This morning at 10 a.m. at 76 stake centers in southeastern Idaho we all joined in a regional meeting broadcast from Salt Lake City. Our speakers today included Elder Neil Anderson from the Presidency of the Seventy, Sister Bonnie Parkin, General Relief Society President, Elder Dallin Oaks from the Quorum of the Twelve, and President James Faust. It was a good meeting and the messages were very pertinent. Yesterday afternoon we had our Priesthood Leadership Meeting at 4 pm and the Adult Session at 7:00 pm. The evening meeting was particularly good — and it’s the only meeting that Nina could attend as she needed to be at the prison this morning during the general session.

So, I’m here at the computer, listening to some lovely Beethovan (Piano Concerto #5), writing in my blog, and thinking about how to organize some family history stories. Nina’s delivering some goodies to a recently-released inmate. The sun is shining and it’s a very nice day.

As the election neared I became more and more convinced that significant change would indeed occur and so it did. I’m concerned that the change won’t be for the better, however.

The school funding issue was soundly defeated (bad). The marriage ammendment passed (good). The so-called property rights bill failed (excellent). Locally every Republican was defeated except for the one person running unchallenged (dumb).  Rumsfeld resigned (two years too late). Gridlock will be the norm for the next two years. The winds are blowing, but will anything really change?

I did notice, however, that the American public is fed up with tainted politicians. It looks like every one with any tar on them got defeated. That’s a good thing. Except that I don’t really think that Washington heard it … again.

Weather is changing again. We had a lovely, balmy day yesterday. Cold, wind, and rain today. Snow in the mountains coming overnight. Winter is settling in. And that’s the gloom for today.