New Year, Fresh Updates

Happy 2020! Isla sure is happy for a new year (or the flash on a camera 😊 )! It’s not quite a new decade unless you’re VH1

thanks for the information XKCD.

A lot happened over Christmas Break. We got a fence built, celebrated Christmas (some by going to Utah), had a snow day in Arnold, and buried a bunch of Conduit… just yesterday!

Fence constructed by John Fox

The great old Government made it better for me to pay someone to do my fence than for me to do it myself. I should probably thank the government, because I wasn’t ever going to get it done. This fence cost about $8000 and it took on about 217 linear feet.

Amazingly they got it up in 2 days and it inspired me that maybe I could work on my home!

…I can’t… at least not quickly/effectively. But that doesn’t stop me from (slowly) trying.

2″ Conduit for Comcast

Still actively working on putting 2” conduit underground near the power conduit and water pipe to establish a better internet connection with Comcast business. It’s been rough getting out there to work on it. But yesterday, Hannah and I worked at it for 2 hours and probably buried about 120’ of the 370’ that needs to be buried. Getting there! We worked so hard I do not even have pictures of our work! But here is a nice one that shows a bit of the trenching and my house in the forever fog!

It’s forever because it appears to always be here this time of year. If I were the type to go on fog walks

Visiting Utah

The older kids got to go to their heaven Utah. Interestingly they got to fly out of Stockton airport to Las Vegas and then drove up to St George.

The airport is so small that it allows for free parking unless it’s overnight.

Visiting Six Flags and Snow

We have some gracious friends who got us in to 6 flags on the last day where you could bring a friend. It was fun for us and the littles:

I have a friend who loans out a cabin in Arnold and he was gracious enough to let us go up there to play in the snow. The girls loved it! The snow was a bit hard in places but We all enjoyed sledding, hot chocolate and building a snowman!

Here’s a video of Thea loving Sledding

Christmas tradition?

I love popcorn! I also love this poem I got at Christmas I got about popcorn. I don’t have the exact copy but this one from the internet has the main idea:

The way I think of it, everyone in life gets pressure and heat, but it’s something more internal that turns this into something enjoyable like fluffy popcorn, or hardened blackened unpopped kernels.

With this in mind I did an exercise with the kids. I painstakingly counted out a kernel for each remaining week each child has with me until they are 18. Which is when society says (and they agree) they are an adult. Tiva had 73 and Isla had somewhere around 700. Then they each got to pop them and apply ‘work’ to each week by stirring the popcorn pot.

Interestingly Tiva’s bowl of popcorn did not pop but became this blackened mess of kernels. I have no idea how it happened and hope it’s not a bad omen 😊

Darrell wanted to make sure I counted correctly, or to see how many weeks he had with us, I don’t know. But he wanted to count every last kernel.

Everyone’s popcorn did like you’d expect and popped up. We shared our “good weeks” with Tiva so she had something to eat.

Bare-Root tree order

Lastly I finally ordered my bareroot trees. Well the ones I could find. I ordered 9 from Morris Nursery near Oakdale and Modesto. They’ll have them for me next Saturday, and will teach a class on taking care of bare-root trees which I will go and participate in. I’ve updated my google doc on the trees I’m buying for any who are interested. I did a lot of research thanks to Dave Wilson’s list of fruit trees. I appreciated their work greatly!

Here’s to a wonderful 2020! Not filled with fruit, but soon to be!