#136 - A new year, snow and peace - Jan 3, 2013

Thursday.

So it's been a few months.  Sue me.

We haven't missed many beats so far - Aria performed in her first drama, then auditioned for and was cast in the Wizard of Oz at her junior high.  Christian has come around to recognizing the value of his strict teacher.  Jakers has learned to read, and now rarely wets the bed as long as his evening liquid intake is regulated.  Libby is now baptized, our first Christmas in this house has passed, the ward choir did a fabulous job in our Christmas devotional, Katrina registered for school, my brother might buy a house and move relatively close to us, and my sister might come out here for an internship.

So that's the short version.

We've had wonderful weather - a long a warm fall, cooling nicely as it got to winter, and snow on Christmas Eve and Christmas day.  It's been very cold since, and we got 2 more snowfalls on the 26th and 29th.  This morning my car said it was 12 degrees when I got in it.  There is a mountain of snow in the parking lot at work - maybe 12' high.  The forest floor around the house is blanketed in snow, still soft and crunchy where it has been undisturbed.  Our pool has frozen over, and if you look in the forest you can see raccoon tracks. We saw a fox skirting our fence last week.

We've all been sick for a couple weeks, too.  This year's cold is nasty.  I've had it for a few weeks, and although I have my energy back, I'm still dealing with a very clogged nose.  No fun at all.  My parents and Katrina's mom came to visit and all got sick as well.  So we've spent nearly their entire vacation sitting around and feeling sorry for ourselves.  I've been going to work most days while the family slept.

Work continues to be interesting and evolve.  I've taken charge of my team, and we're making solid forward progress.  The team is made up of smart, hard-working guys, who are relatively new to working in a corporate environment.  It's my goal to help them become better engineers and to also be able to navigate the corporate environment better.  It's a completely foreign skill set to most people, and must be learned organically.  So I've put some structure to it, and we're starting to make progress.  It's good stuff.

I also expect to get 4 other people to join my team in the near future.  Things have been progressing in a certain way for a while, and I expect some people to make decisions soon that will make this happen.  It means I'll gain responsibility for another facet of our operation here, and I'm excited about it.  It's going to be a good thing.  A good thing for sure.

I have a million pictures - here are a couple from November: our first snow of the year.  Enough for sledding before it melted in the morning, and Katrina volunteering to help with recovery from Hurricane Sandy on Staten Island.