Our updates for all of you

Taken last night, our tree with Stacy's Santa that climbs up and down the ladder in a 30 second exposure. Below, no snow on Christmas this year, but a cold 23 degrees as the photo taken looking across the street shows the snow and ice from the snow last two weeks ago. A nice sunny COLD day! Christmas Day 2009 found me and Stacy enjoying the day getting phone calls, texts, and e-mails. We also spent a couple of hours working outside trying to move our storage build back 5 inches. Only five inches! Couldn't do it though, too frozen, too slippery and no traction for the tractor. Tomorrow? We go out in the after Christmas craziness and replace our 4 year old dish washer. Merry Christmas!!! Tad

I had a dentist appointment this morning and thought I'd take a few photos while I was out for the appointment. After the appointment I stopped and filled up the KIa (4 wheel drive!). All this snow is just from the last 3 days of snowfall! Above photo- is of the ONLY stoplight intersection in town and of the ONLY 'fast food' place in town"Zip's". Below- looking South on Main street. Above- Looking on Alderson Lane from the gas station. Below- Driving North on "Main street" as it's known in town. Highway 95 & 2 if you're just passing through to Canada North, or all the way down to Nevada on Highway 95 South. Or you might be traveling to Montana heading East or Washington going West on Highway 2. . Anyway, over a foot of snow in just a few days. Normally it doesn't snow this much until right at Christmas or after. Doesn't look like it right now but the winter is predicted to be cold but dryer than normal around here. We'll h...

Well, we've been back for a week and a day now, and nope, we are not even near getting all caught up yet! But, Tad and I wanted to jot down an outline of our trip while it is still so fresh in our minds and the visions are still dancing in our dreams. We flew down on Saturday the 21st of November. Sandy and Sean met us at the airport. When we arrived at Sandy and Erik's apartment, Thanksgiving dinner was cooked and ready to eat. Sandy did a beautiful job with all of the Thanksgiving dishes. We visited and Sean entertained us with his guitar playing, and we watched the movie UP. Monday morning we were up early and flew from John Wayne Airport to San Francisco, made our way to the International terminal and boarded a giant 747. Sandy had procured us an economy plus seat which allowed us a few extra inches of leg room. Thanks Sandy!. We took up the four center seats of a 10 across row. We were only two rows from a divider, so we had a great view of a rather large flat scr...

It has taken a few days, almost a week actually, but Stacy and I have almost gotten our biological clocks reset to Pacific Time from Central European Time. I'm up to sleeping until 5:30 am or so from being wide awake from 1:30 to 2:30 am. Stacy is sleeping to 5:30 to almost alarm time of 6:00 am. We're both still fighting to stay up to 9:00 pm though! The nine hour time difference makes most of Germany's daytime during our night and most of our daytime during their night. This week has been getting back in the swing of things at work, I've been transferring the video we took on the trip to DVD. We took about 4 hours worth of video on the SD cards. Taking that video to the computer then converting it to DVD has taken DAYS! Everyday since Monday and getting only two disks done a day it takes so long. The last disk, number 5, is a partial so it actually should be done before we go home tonight. So tomorrow I'm back to sorting the photos and get at least some on-line ...

Safely back from Germany Stacy and I are kind of resting as we clean up at Sandy's apartment today, do a little laundry and relax a bit before the final flights back to Spokane tomorrow. We averaged walking about 8 miles each day while in Germany, flew over 10,000 miles there and back. We sat through 7 movies and 6 TV shows on the 747-400's over both flights. Between me Stacy and Sandy we took almost 2,000 photos while we were there. And Stacy and I took almost 4 hours of video. I also recorded a couple of hours of audio with my Olympus recorder. While in Germany we did try to add a quick update to the blog but found out that the keyboards in Germany are WAY different than ours here, and if the letters are rubbed off from use FOR GET IT!!! We gave up after struggling to find the right letters we needed to access our accounts. I gave it a go and gave up when I was unable to locate the "@" symbol! You can't do much without finding the "at" symbol! We'r...