Our updates for all of you

Seems like the weather is the talk of the towns in all the areas that I check up on! Here it has 'warmed up' to be staying in the 30's most of the time during the day and 20's at night. It started out sunny this AM but now the next storm expected tonight is working its way in as cloud cover. Yesterday though, snowed all day long and we got over 7 inches of new snow during the day! There hasn't been any reports yet of local snowfall but in Spokane, over 56 inches broke the records there for this time of year. We're supposed to get another 5 to 8 inches tonight and tomorrow. At our house we have over 3 feet of snow so far. Christmas was really great this year. I got the things I'd been really wanting without too much begging, the new XM radio that records up to 5 channels at once, stores up to 100 hours of programing, gets a program guide in the radio so you can see whats coming up on that channel for 3 days ahead. And it can pause and rewind live radio for u

I had started to wonder about that after I finished the last post. So I'd checked and yes, it had been just a little over a year since I started doing these. I'd hoped that Stacy would be able to add her thoughts, and she has on occasion. But these have mainly been my view of things in our world. So I'm listening to SiriusXm as always, and on Radio Classics it is Christmas week shows so all programs are of that theme. A radio show from 12/25/1958 called "The Couple Next Door" is helping me recall Christmas's of my own past. Things I remember most from being a kid at Christmas time was the anticipation of Christmas Eve to Christmas Day. We were never allowed to open any gifts until THE morning. All the 'Santa gifts' and the stockings were set out after us kids were in bed. We'd go up to go to bed and that's when my 'vigil' started. I remember many of those Eve's where I was so excited about what to expect the next day that I'd l

It's been a busy few weeks. I've been working on some video projects so I haven't had too much extra time to add a post. Most of today I've been going over the contract for our monitoring company here at work. We use the cell and satellite ankle monitors for our "clients" that need them. It IS winter! We'd not had any snow before last weekend. Got 16 inches overnight then. Started snowing again on Wednesday and snowed over 24 hours straight for another almost 12 inches of snow. Between the storms it was an arctic blast that got the area down to between 10 to 25 BELOW zero. Warmed up to teens yesterday and is 14 right now. Its going to get cold again though. Expected to be 5 to 10 below tonight, only up to 3 or 4 tomorrow. So winter is here. It really is too, on Saturday! Last weekends Christmas add at Best Buy got my attention. If you really looked at it, it was a lot of Sales, and Free, things that were far from it! The one I was talking to Stacy about

After no snow so far all fall, fall/winter made up for it by snowing over a foot and a half of snow from about 2 PM yesterday to early this AM. Part two as predicted has been the morning temp of 20 that during the day has gotten colder to the current 13. While no more snow is predicted for the next few days, its supposed to get colder than its been since 2004. How does a low of 3 above tonight with a high of 6 tomorrow sound? By Monday, a bit nippy at 8 to 15 BELOW zero with a high of 3 above and with the winds of the approaching front, wind chill temps of 40 below zero are expected. It isn't supposed to 'warm up' until late next week when a "warmer" cold front moves in and with it the next chance of snow. Already just today, there are several inch to over a foot long ice sickles hanging off the roof line. I like the ones that look clear but with speckles from other water drops that have frozen on the main ice sickle. They look pretty cool to me. No pun intended!

More actually, some memories of my career in Animal Control. I had experience with both kinds of those guns, shotguns were experienced as a sender and almost reciever from one! A T-gun or 'Tranquilizer' gun is a gun that can be either a sci- fi looking handgun style CO2 cartridge fired pistol. Or it could be a 22 caliber blank fired rifle. Both types used the same kind of hollow aluminum tube as the dart/syringe for the tranquilizing drug. The front of the dart was a barbed injector, in the early days we used to use the non-barbed kind but they were too often lost. With the barbed kind of tip they were usually stuck in the dog, or tree, or dirt if you missed, if you could actually find the dart again! When fired, the dart had a low power gunpowder cartridge inside that went off to push a plunger that started to inject the solution as the dart traveled to the target/animal. One thing that was forever a problem was the public perception of how the tranquilizer actually worked.

Today I had part one of a three part plan to replace all the fillings I've had since I was a kid. A couple of weeks ago I thought I ought to use my dental plan, better than my old one, and go have a check up. I decided to try a new dentist in town because the one I'd been to before, while he was OK, his hygienist would never be called painless! Just too many slips of those sharp pointy things to stab me in my mouth. So I went in and had two sessions to bring my teeth up to snuff, but I was also told that my silver fillings should have been replaced 'decades' ago. Did you know that fillings are only supposed to last about 10 to 15 years? I didn't, and none of the dentists I've had over the years back in California must not have know that either. Must be like how almost everything has an expiration date on it now. Didn't when I was a kid. You kept it in the fridge until it almost crawled out on it own power in those days. I'm still alive after all of it to

For us, this year is so much better than last with Stacy no longer at a job where she was on forever graveyard shift! Stacy even ventured out and became a "Wal-Mart Warrior" and did battle with the "Black Friday" crowd at our local Wal-Mart Super Center as well as the little mall we have in that same area. A scratch on her hand and a broken fingernail where the only injuries she suffered from all the shoppers at Wal- Mart! No one was trampled as was reported at other stores, but Stacy did say how rude a lot of people were there. I guess the area motto of 'friendliest city' goes out the window on Black Friday! I personally think its because of that 5 am start time. Stacy got up a little before 4 am to wake up and make the 30 minute drive to the store. She told me that the only cars out that morning were all going to Wal-Mart. An almost 25 mile long line of cars and trucks all going south to shop. And when there the line was most of the way around the store,