72-hour kit

Jack & I..well, mostly Jack...has been trying to get our 72 hour kits in order. I decided my contribution could be homemade firestarters. I have been wanting to make these for a long time. They are super easy & cheap to make. All it takes is cardboard egg carton (I used the carton from my Costco eggs...you get three w/ each bulk package), dryer lint, and candle wax. It cost me less then $6 to make about 50 of these big ones that are pictured. I also made mini firestarters from the part of the carton the sticks up. I tested out a mini one in the fireplace...it burned for about 5 minutes. I thought the mini ones would be great to put in a backpack for a hike. Here in Oregon we are forever hearing about people getting lost in the woods unprepared. Not the Blazer's....we would have fire!!!

Eagles

My sister lives in a pretty rural area up near the Canadian border. It is absolutely beautiful up there. The weather was really nice while I was there. The most amazing thing is the wild life. They have a big pond across the street from their new house that always has big flocks of birds hanging out. They also have bald eagles everywhere. We saw tons of them during the 2 days that I was there. Some were right in the trees in their yard but most were in the trees across the street. It was cool to see how big they were even from far away you could tell that they were huge. We even saw one in a field eating on something that it had caught. In this picture you can just barely see 2 eagles perched in the top trees across the street from Kelly's house.

These two are of the same eagle in a tree right in Kelly's yard. It was really neat to see one so close in the wild.

Weekend Trip

I took a quick trip w/o Jack up to my sisters house for my nephews missionary farewell. He is going to Monterrey Mexico. He gave a GREAT talk on the history of missionary work in sacrament meeting on Sunday. We are so proud that he has chosen and is worthy to serve a mission. Up there the whole week and didn't get hardly any pictures...not a single one of any of the nephews. I posted a few below...

Mackenzie, Kyla, & Kelly

Kyla & Mackenzie

Snow..then rain..now wind.

It has been a crazy Winter for us so far. The latest is the wind. The wind coming through the Columbia River Gorge for the last 24 hours has been brutal. There was a 70 mile per hour gust reported in our area last night. Tiffany was here visiting and we came home from the mall last night to the main road to the house closed (found out later a tree had fallen across the road) and a completely blacked out neighborhood. Thank goodness Tiffany was with me. It would have been scary to be in dark all night by myself. We had no power off and on until 10 o'clock this morning.

These trees are in the park just 1/2 a block from our house. We also lost several other trees through out the neighborhood.

This house is around the corner from ours. As you can see the tree from one propertey fell across the fence into the other property. You can't see if very well but there is a shed underneath the fallen tree.

We are lucky so far the trees around us have held strong and we haven't lost any shingles off of our roof

Whose in charge here?

This was the scene from the sun porch yesterday morning. It cracked me up that Dora has one whole half of the loveseat all to herself and both dogs have crammed themselves into the other half. I always tell people the Dora is "the Queen". I guess this proves that she is.

Out with the Old...In with the New

Old Freezer.

New Freezer...bought at Sears a week ago. Inside. Tons of room!!! Costco here we come. So the options for Christmas this year was a Wii or a new freezer. We decided that we should do the practical thing..even though it was the more expensive thing..and get a new freezer. We bought the old one used for a $100 in 1997. It still works great but we had out grown it. Every freezer we have was packed. I always worried if the frozen food I bought at the grocery store was going to fit. No more worries! I moved everything from the old one into the new one plus moved stuff from 2 other refridgerator freezes and I still have tons of space. I love it!!

Snow Day #3

I woke up this morning to find more snow. At 6 o'clock this morning, when I got up to call work to let them know the I would not be in due to the weather & road conditions, there was no snow on the Tahoe. I got up for the day about 2 1/2 hours later to find this. And the weather man said no snow for today??? It continued to snow until about 11 o'clock at which point I decided to get out of the house with the dogs so I dusted off my snow boots...haven't had to use them in years...got out my heavy coat, scarf, and gloves, and layered on the clothes.

The east wind had blown the snow up against the front door. I had to push real hard on the screen door to get out. See how deep it is. The is about 2 inches between the top of the front porch and the thresh hold into the house. I was able to get this shovel but I didn't even try to shovel the walk. There is just SO much snow. I started to shovel the driveway so that Jack could get the X-Terra out of the garage to go to work but I noticed that there is a layer of ice under the snow so I stopped because I thought it might make it harder for him to get out especially since it is up hill to get out of the garage. We will have to re-evaluate one he tries to get it out.

The dogs had a good time running around in the deep snow & catching snowballs. They haven't been out too much so it was good for them to use some of the pent up energy. I was going to walk them down to the far end of the block but the snow was so deep I had a hard time walking through it. So we just walked to the neighbors boat.

This is a picture from the back yard. Notice my black compost bin & the fence are almost covered.

We were outside for about an hour while it wasn't snowing. Almost as soon as we came in it started snowing again.

There is so much snow that the city is having a hard time keeping up with the removal. The Mayor of Gresham has declared a state emergency because fire, police, & ambulances are having a hard time getting around the city.

At this rate, we will have a white Christmas. It would be our first since moving here.