Happy Winter Solstice!

Hello everyone!

Just a couple more days until that much deserved Christmas vacation!

We have been getting much snow over the last couple of days. We have been over in the hotel painting all week. I even put in a few hours on Saturday. The wind has really been blowing the snow into big drifts, and I often snowshoe to the hotel for work. Luckily, it has been warm though. The temperature has been averaging about 35 degrees all week which is just wonderful, and we haven't had any more problems with the pipes freezing. I did have to shovel out the wood on the side of the house again. It was a big challenge because the warm weather had melted it into a heavy mess.

I have really been getting ahead with my painting. There are still cracks that need repaired, but we are almost done in the annex of the hotel. The annex has four floors with 17 rooms on each floor. I probably have one or two more days of painting/repairing in the annex before it is on to the main hotel. The bummer about the main hotel is that all the rooms are open to the lobby, so we will have to heat individual rooms instead of a whole floor at a time. Not to mention, there are also four floors in the main hotel. There is still so much work to do!

Today (Sunday), it is snowing again. At this point I actually look forward to the snow. We haven't seen much of the sheep lately, except for one day last week. We actually saw one of the males ram Jeff's car! He didn't ram it too hard. I think he just wanted to show us who was boss. I thought it was pretty funny, but I wouldn't have if it would have been my car.

We will be going out to get out mail on Tuesday or Wednesday. The park rangers told us they would pick us up at the gate if we called ahead of time. That will save us 7 miles if they can. We can no longer drive the car anywhere, so we have to walk all the way from the cabin. That makes the trip to the Post Office 14 miles if we can get picked up at the gate. We will take our 65 liter packs (large packs for backpacking) so that we can carry our mail, food, water, skis, and snowshoes. Since the wind is always blowing the snow into drifts, there are often parts of the road that are blown bare. But, there are also snowy parts that we can ski or snowshoe. It will be a learning experience that will teach us the best gear to use.

Well, I hope that you have a wonderful Christmas and a Happy New Year. I will look forward to hearing all about it when you get back to school!