The connection in Atlanta was very tight, however immigration and customs went very quickly. When I got to to the boarding gate for the flight to Salt Lake City, boarding was almost finished. Someone was sitting in my seat and the flight was very full. Turns out he was in the wrong seat which was a very good thing otherwise I likely would have had one of the two remaining middle seats. The air was very turbulent the entire trip and the flight attendants stayed seated the whole trip. I kind of dozed a couple of times and finished my book. We arrived in Salt Lake City about 20 minutes ahead of schedule.

The airplane full of people, including me, arrived, but my luggage didn’t. The connection must have been too tight. The baggage people at Delta assured me the bags would be on the 9:30 flight from Atlanta. By this time it was 7 p.m. and I need my breathing machine to have any kind of useful sleep, so Nina and I elected to wait in Salt Lake until the 9:30 flight arrived. The day was definitely getting longer!

Our neice Ashlyn also joined us at the airport. She’ll be staying at our house for the next several months until her next semester at BYU-Idaho starts in May. To pass some time we drove uptown to a Chili’s restaurant and had dinner. I went back into the baggage claim area at 9:15 and the Atlanta flight had just landed. A few minutes later my baggage came down the chute onto the baggage carousel, a welcome sight indeed. We loaded up and headed north to Pocatello. Other than some occasional very dense fog, the trip was unremarkable indeed. Bed was a welcome sight as well. I had been up and going for 26 hours by this time.

It’s now Thursday morning and I’m headed to the shower and to work. It’s good to be home.

The weather forecasting services are predicting a major snowstorm in the area of southern Idaho and northern Utah. The storm is expected to start on Friday afternoon and continue through the weekend and bring snow accumulations of up to nineteen inches on the ground in Pocatello, Idaho. The newspapaer this morning went so far as to call it "The Perfect Storm", obviously in reference to the book and movie of the same name. The premise of the book, which was later made into a movie, was that an unusual set of circumstances occurred at the same time so as to create a monster storm in the northern Atlantic Ocean. The circumstances that the local paper referred to are an unusually moist flow of air coming across California headed eastward, a fairly intense low pressure system moving southeast out of Canada, which will pick up the moist airflow from California and send it counterclockwise across Idaho, and an unusually cold mass of air moving south out of the Arctic. That combination of events is expected to deliver more snow in one storm than has happened for more than 50 years.

It will be good if it happens, but lots of folks aren’t holding their breath! The storm has been too heavily hyped. While I think we will get snow, it won’t be more than about seven inches. That’s my prediction. Now let the weather happen and we’ll see how good I am at prognisticating the weather!

It does lead me to a different question. Where is, for me, the best weather? I have to qualify that because my wife Nina may well have a completely different idea of what would constitute "perfect weather." In my scenario, it would not snow, ever. I could go to snow if I wanted, but I would not have to own a snowblower, snowshovel, or ice scrapers for car windows. It would rain occasionally, mostly at night with the occasional warm afternoon shower. Rain is good as it cleans out the air, keeps down the dust, and washes plant leaves making them much more attractive. There would be more than 300 days of sunshine a year. That would mean about 1/6th of the time the day would be cloudy and perhaps there would be rain. The area would be green and lush, abundant with trees, grass, flowers, and other plant life, but not too humid. Temperatures would range from a low of 45-55 degrees with a high of 85-90 degrees during the summer and perhaps ten degrees cooler in the winter. At some point in the history of our species, a place like this existed and was called "The Garden of Eden." Are there places like this on this planet? I would expect there are. I don’t know where they are, however, so I’ve got some looking to do to find the perfect weather!

A good friend told me once that any day that starts with him being able to be vertical has to be a good day. The same could be said about a new year. Being above ground and vertical is a very good thing. Over the past few days a few snow squalls have blown through leaving behind about four inches of snow. East of here in Soda Springs, which is about 1,200 feet higher in elevation, some six to eight inches of snow are on the ground. The snow is rather dry, unfortunately, having left almost all the moisture behind in the Sierra Nevada mountains where it came down in somewhat unwelcome quantities. There’s been enough snow, however, to cause me to get out the snowblower the past three mornings and get rid of the snow on the driveway. Maybe this counts as exercise?

The month of January will be very busy. I’ll be headed to Belgium on the 8th returning on the 19th. After a couple of days at home, I’ll be headed for Orlando and the Lotusphere Convention for the last week of the month. I’ve gotten quite used to listening to podcasts on my iPod, but that whole setup is built around my home PC. I need to get this stuff transferred to a laptop so that I can keep up-to-date while I’m travelling. I’ll need to figure out if there is a way to transfer my history from the home desktop computer to a laptop so I don’t end up downloading everything all over again. That’s just a waste of bandwidth.

I think I have the e-mail posting problem resolved, but there’s still one problem that currently belies explanation. I’ve put a wget command in crontab to run every hour. That is working, but I’m also getting a "file or directory not found" email being sent from the web server at the time that the crontab is being run. I’ll have to ask someone at work if they know what the problem might be. It’s pretty strange. But, because I think email is now working correctly, I’ll send one in this afternoon and see if it gets posted.

The remnants of Christmas have pretty much disappeared from around the house. The only thing left are the lights along the roof of the house that Jared put up when he visited here over Thanksgiving. The Young Men’s organization in our Ward is doing a service project this week of taking down lights and I’ve signed up. They should be coming on Wednesday which will remove the last evidence that we decorated for Christmas this year. Bradica (the dog) now has several fewer things to stand underneath as both Christmas trees are down. Why do dogs stand underneath trees and branches so that they rub across their backs? Or is it that only our dog stands underneath things? It’s also another mystery for a Sunday morning.

It’s time to head for the shower and get cleaned up to go to Church. Today is Fast Sunday — the day when we skip two meals in a 24-hour period and donate the money we would have spent to the Church to be spent on the poor. This Sunday we are being asked to fast and pray for the families of the victims of massive Tsunami’s that followed the earthquake in the Indian Ocean and to donate generously to the relief efforts. They are indeed in our thoughts and prayers and we’ll make a significant donation today.

Nina and I were talking last evening at dinner about the difference that one year can make. Last year at this time we were in Chandler, Arizona spending the Christmas vacation with our daughter Jaelene and her family. We were living in Colorado Springs and thought that we would be there for the rest of my working career. It’s now a year later and we’re living in Pocatello, Idaho and in a completely different job. Our wildest imaginations would not have predicted this outcome to the year.

In fact, if someone had told us we would be in Pocatello and would like living here, we would have written them off as being crazy. The truth is, we’re here and we’re quite happy to be here. We like the house, we like where we are living, we like the Ward we attend, I enjoy my job, our life is much less hectic, and in general, life is very good.

Nina is in Soda Springs today visiting with some family who have come up for the day. I need to be at work (I’ve used up all my vacation for the year cruising round rivers and oceans) so I didn’t go over. It’s supposed to start raining and then snowing as the evening progresses so I expect she won’t stay over there too late in the afternoon. The weather right now is mostly cloudy and somewhat windy. I don’t know where the bad weather is, but it isn’t very visible right now. The big news is the massive loss of life in south Asia because of the tidal waves following a massive earthquake in the Indian Ocean. The estimates currently are in excess of 60,000 people dead with thousands missing. There are no warning systems in that part of the world for people to get to higher ground or further inland. Everyone there lives by the sea since that’s the source of most of their food and livelihood and they didn’t stand a chance. The earthquake, measuring 9 on the Richter scale, is one of the largest earthquakes in modern history. It changed the orbital speed of the planet by about 3 microseconds and changed the wobble about the earth’s axis by about an inch. Other estimates are that one teutonic plate slide about 98 feet under another plate, making the earth slightly smaller around and moving stuff in the Pacific Ocean all around.

The Church has asked us to fast and pray for the victims’ families on this upcoming Fast Sunday and then to make very generous donations to the humanitarian funds. We will do that. As this year comes to an end and I look at my life and conditions, we are truly blessed. We have enough to share.