Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Goodbye January

As January fades into the history books, and February 1 appears on our calendars tomorrow, I look forward to seeing April and May drawing near! Temperatures are dropping with the Arctic cold front moving into Montana this week and into the weekend. We received an inch of snow on Monday night and last night just a dusting. The snow is good, but how about warming up just a little so it can melt. My truck is rear-wheel drive and it doesn't do so well on the snow packed road to our house.

This weekend I think I might construct a headboard for the bed... After three years I think it is about time to do something and now that I have a few more tools I think the time has come. I am still running through some design ideas, but I think I have a general idea of what is going to be put together. I will be making a trip to Home Depot and Lowe's later this morning, as well as Ace Hardware.

Not too much to say today. Just another cold day here in Montana and I will be keeping myself busy indoors. Until again

-=Nolan=-

Monday, January 29, 2007

BINGO!

Hey everyone! Welcome back from the weekend. I know everyone is happy to be done with it huh!?

To start off our fun filled weekend, Laura and I ventured across town to play BINGO with friends. We didn't win, but a few of our friends won, and Jesse (the guy who tried to drink the gallon of milk with me) even hit it big - winning a $30 game! All we managed to do was lose and smell like smoke, I never knew so many old ladies could smoke at once! We capped off the night by making a trip to Wal-Mart to browse for deals and wallow in our loses...

Our weekend wasn't very eventful otherwise. We did some geocaching, but we have nearly found every geocache within 20 miles of Missoula now, and we have to travel quite a distance before we arrive at our nearest cache. The second trouble is most of the caches we have left to do are in the mountains, which are covered with several feet of snow. We are ready for the snow to be gone, so we can do some hiking!

We have three mountains picked to hike this summer in the immediate area. Those being Lolo Peak, Stuart Peak, and Squaw Peak.

Laura and I hiked near Lolo Peak in October 2005, but we hiked the North Peak which is a few hundred feet lower than Lolo Peak just to the south. You see North Peak and Lolo Peak together on the right side of the picture - really you are mostly just seeing North Peak because it covers Lolo Peak when you look at it from the valley. The ski runs on the left side of the picture is the Bitterroot Resort which is a hot topic right now around Missoula. Right now the ski runs are on private property, but the resort is trying to expand into the National Forest and go all the way to the top of Lolo Peak - which is 7 miles from the ski area. It would be the largest ski resort in the United States by far. The reason a lot of people don't like the idea is because the mountain offers great hiking and amazing views from the top, along with a hybrid forest near the ridge of the mountain, which occurs nowhere else in the world. I took the picture of North Peak and Lolo Peak from the park across the street from our house. You can see the two mountains a little better and get an idea what it looks like. We climbed the mountain on the right - we gook our picture on the cliffs at the top - the ones facing the raven.

Stuart Peak over looks Missoula from the north - in the Rattlesnake Wilderness. You can see it as the tallest peak in the photo to the left. You can also see the inversion which was here last week. That is a mixture of pollution and fog in the valley - thankfully, our house was above the inversion and we were able to see the sun the entire day. Here's some more of the inversion - it really just looks like a sea of clouds, but they were about 300 feet thick. Missoula is down in that fog somewhere... Sometimes I kinda like this look though, I don't have to look at the city below! Oops, did I say that out loud!?!

Laura and I have hiked into the wilderness boundary before, and Stuart Peak shouldn't be too much trouble for us to hike. If we had some snow shoes we might actually try to hike it before the snow melted, but as it is, we are stuck to boots or old running shoes and we need a fairly dry trail. Hopefully we will be able to knock this one off the list early in the summer or late spring because the mountains around Stuart don't get a lot of snow and what snow they do receive tends to melt early in the spring due to the fact they have a south face.

Squaw Peak will be our challenge to climb this summer though. It's about in the middle in the picture to the right - hard to see because of the pollution hanging over Missoula. I took this picture last week while Laura and I were geocaching. No, that's not smoke from forest fires, that's just the pollution that Missoula and the Bitterroot Valley put into the air and this is AFTER major air quality control has been done in the past decade. This was actually the day before the inversion fog set in - you can see the smog sitting up to create the fog once freezing occurred. YUK! Anyway, Squaw Peak is about 25 miles west of Missoula, which will make it hard to get to - just the fact we have to drive awhile to get there. However, I think this might be the most rewarding mountain of the three because we will be able to see into the Missoula area and also to the north into the Flathead Valley.

If you couldn't tell, I am ready for spring to arrive so I can start enjoying the outdoors without needing a coat and that also means that Spring League Ultimate will be starting too! It can't get here soon enough...

Until again

-=Nolan=-

Friday, January 26, 2007

Money Money Money

What can I say about money? Well, I suppose I can say quite a lot. I could complain about spending money, I could complain about low wages, I could talk about how great it is that we don't pay sales tax in Montana, or I could do some more complaining about the cost of car insurance here...

BUT, I'm not going to talk about any of that. I am going to talk about finding money! I have always stopped to pick up pennies on the ground, next to the curb, in the parking lot... It's just something I do. Since high school I started keeping track of how much money I have found, and it is amazing how much money is out there! I hesitate to even blog this information because I don't want others to be picking up my fortune!

Back in high school I kept a monthly collection of random coins I would find. In October of 1999 I found nearly $3.00 just around the high school in change! At the time I thought I was making pretty good money.

I dated a girl in high school and into college, we dated for three years, and after a year we kept a 'pot' of found money. It all started out when we were out for a walk and found an intersection with pennies scattered everywhere. I don't know what the story was with all those pennies, but we picked them up and came up with the idea of keeping them in a jar and see how much we could find. When we broke up two years later, we decided to split the money and we both came away with $20, all from found money!

Since 2005, Laura and I have been keeping a similar jar of found money. When I was in college I took a pottery class and sculpted a pot on the wheel to keep some found money in. Since January of 2005 we have been adding money almost every week. Every Sunday evening we add the money we found during the week to the pot and add up our total findings. When we moved to Missoula in August 2005 we had about $15 in found money already in the pot. In October, while out for a bike ride, Laura rode past a $20 bill in the street and I stopped to pick it up. I gave her a hard time about missing the money, but yesterday she got me back...

While we were out for a walk up the mountain, we did our usual climb to the top and back down. Since temperatures were in the low 40's we decided another mile wouldn't hurt, so we continued on a longer route. A little over half a mile later I spotted a few things on the ground in front of us and started glancing around to see what everything was. I passed right over the $20 and my eye caught a crushed aluminum can. Laura bent down to pick up the bill and looked at me with a big smile on her face. I had already taken a step past the bill and nearly stopped dead in my tracks when I noticed the $20 in her hand! How did I miss that? So, when we add the #20 into the pot on Sunday night, we will have over $75 in found money - granted that $40 of that is in paper money we have found, but that also means that over $35 is in coins we have found.

My Junior and Senior year in college were some of the best times for finding money. When we would have easy days at practice we would usually have 5-8 miles of running to do, so we would run side streets to find money, we called them a "Money Run." We would keep track of which streets we had ran on in the past few weeks and try to pick out new streets to see what money might be laying in the street. The distance runners thought it was kind of weird and funny, but by the time I graduated, everyone was looking for the money when we were running - which then resulted in me finding less money! See why I don't want everyone to know this secret!? Ha ha!

This weekend we don't have much going on. We might find a few geocaches, but that is all we have thought about doing. There is talk of playing some BINGO tonight with some friends, so who knows what kinds of fun we will have. Until again

-=Nolan=-

Thursday, January 25, 2007

As Random As It Gets

This might be the most random blog I have published to date, but then again, that means I have a lot of random news so I might as well blog it.

First off, you might have noticed the new header at the top of the page..? You did? Well good, it took me awhile to get that thing put together so I am glad it hasn't gone unnoticed. That picture is one I have blogged before - it is a panoramic picture that I took while hunting with Laura in the Bitterroot Valley this season. A guy from Bozeman is actually using the photo as an inspiration for a painting - well, actually we has my permission to use the photo for his painting and I am looking forward to see what becomes of it. I have been wanting to put some sort of header photo at the top of my blog for at least a year now, but I just didn't know how to write the html script for it. Two nights ago I had a restless night (thinking of adding a header to the blog) and I decided to just see what I could do. By 2:00 a.m. I had things put together; not bad for basically teaching myself how to do everything. I don't know if I will stick with just one photo or perhaps place a different header every few months - I do like the look of it.

Hopefully I will survive long enough to blog another month or more. Turns out, by living in Missoula, Montana that my chances of being injured or killed are significantly higher. I have mentioned the ridiculously high number of drunk drivers and that Montana has the highest incidents of drunk driving accidents in the U.S.. To go along with that, last week the state Department of Transportation released a study of the most dangerous intersections in the state. Turns out Missoula had three of the most dangerous intersections in the state, and they all happen to be on one of the most dangerous roads in the state! Oh yeah, if you have been to Missoula then you know what street I am talking about. I complain about it all the time when I am driving and I let it be known that it is a joke. In 2005 Reserve Street had over 2500 traffic accidents - that is 6-7 accidents per day. I have had my fair share of close calls on Reserve and the way people drive around here reminds me of being in high school and taking drivers education wherever I drive. The great thing about our Christmas vacation to Wyoming and Nebraska is the fact that drivers are rather nice and even though I have seen a lot of bad drivers in Nebraska, I don't fear that I am going to get T-boned or rear-ended at every intersection. If they want to hit the Canubaru then I might not complain as much, as long as they actually have some insurance and can pay for my next car, but that might be unlikely as well, so I just drive extra defensively and honk a lot!

As if the traffic were not enough, another study released last week showed that Missoula has some of the most polluted air in the United States. I found that hard to believe, not the fact the air was polluted, but that it was one of the highest ranking cities. On the other hand, Cheyenne, Wyoming had some of the cleanest air so it's nice to know I can breath freely when I am visiting the in-laws.

Here is some of the work I have been doing on a new program I downloaded. The program is Google Sketch Up 6. It is designed to be a free program to design building in 3D. This is a model I created a few days ago. Laura and I are starting to brainstorm some ideas for our house we are hoping to start building in the next five years - once we can afford to build a house without a loan. This is a very rough idea for our den or 'library' room but we have some ideas we wanted to look at and see what we could come up with. While we were shopping in Cheyenne, we came across a bookstore that had a rolling ladder and thought it would be neat to have a tall bookshelf and a rolling ladder to get to the books at the top. However, after doing some research on the internet, I have found these ladders run well over $500 and suddenly I think a 'custom built homemade ladder' would be a nice touch to the room. Don't you think? For $500 that ladder better get my books for me and maybe even read a little of the book too! OH! Don't take the colors in my model as the colors we want, I just wanted some color to show the walls and the bookshelf, along with the floor and how the room would look. We've got a long way to go.

Gas prices have finally dropped below $2.00 a gallon. Prices around Missoula are at $1.99/gallon. However, if you watched the State of the Union address given on Tuesday evening then you know that The President is pushing to increase the nations strategic oil reserve by 2 million gallons, which means that the price of gas will increase to at least $2.50 a gallon to compensate for the reduction of oil available to the consumers (you and I).

The new Google Earth 4 has made it's way to the internet for download. I would recommend downloading it if you like Google Earth 3. Although there isn't much change from the previous version, the new interface is pretty cool and I prefer it over the older program. One of the cool things about Google Earth is that when we are looking up geocaches, we can look them up in Google Earth and see how many are around. When we travel I usually follow the route we will be taking on Google Earth and find the caches that look like we will be able to find near the highway. The above picture is looking at the South Hills in Missoula. Our house is nearly in the middle of the picture. Another cool thing with Google Earth is the terrain modeling - as you can see the mountains in the background and the mountain we live on.

This morning we had an inversion in the valley and it was still dark about an hour after sunrise. Right now, for me up on the mountain, the sun is shining and I can see some blue sky up above, but when Talk of the Town is over I am going to venture out and see what the valley looks like - it might be quite a sight.

My last random news snippet comes from Nebraska. Stapleton, Nebraska to be exact. I received a letter from my grandma who keeps an eye on the news around town. She came upon an interesting little article and sent it to me. Don't worry grandma, I saved the stamp! Here's what the paper said:

Received a report of suspicious circumstances in Stapleton. Upon a tip from Village Officials, investigation led to finding a small capsule hidden in Stapleton. Further investigation showed that the capsule was part of a nationwide geocache "treasure hunt." People with GPS devices log onto the site, get clues, and stop, find the object, sign the guest or "finders" list and move on. The web site showed that people from all over the United States had been visiting Stapleton since April of 2005 just to find the object and sign the list. The object was replaced for the next person to find.

Well imagine that! The geocache that Laura and I hide along with my cousin, made the local newspaper. The great thing is that they replaced the geocache for the next people to find. That there is small town Nebraska and you can't beat that!

That about does it for me today. Was that random enough? I am going to go see what can be seen of the inversion. Until again

-=Nolan=-

Monday, January 22, 2007

Weekend Cachers

I think it's rather clear when looking at the title what our weekend activities consisted of... You guessed it, geocaching! We are still a far cry from the 1,000 milestone, but we are slowly working our way to it. We added eight this weekend and ended with 969 finds. The geocaching meeting/party on Saturday was a lot of fun, although the geocaching community does not appeal to many people our age. Not that it really matters, but a large majority of geocachers are retired or middle-aged folks whose kids are older than Laura and I. The great thing about it though, is we can all get together and still talk about geocaching and share stories of the adventures we have had while geocaching. After the party, about a dozen of us went geocaching in the dark to find a few caches, while we were waiting for everyone to arrive at the park we joked about a car driving past being a police officer. Everyone laughed and shared a story or two of their encounters with the police while geocaching. It seems to be a common encounter anymore! There were around 25 people at the party, which is by far the largest event we have been to, and we didn't realize there were that many people geocaching around Missoula.

With all the hype over the geocaching this weekend, Laura and I actually hid another cache. Usually we just place a cache somewhere for people to go find, but yesterday we designed a 'puzzle cache' that requires the finders to figure out a kakuro puzzle before finding the cache. What's a kakuro puzzle you ask? It's really a simple concept that can give you a lot of headache if you don't like doing some math. To solve the puzzle you fill in the light colored boxes with a number between 1-9. The light boxes are called the 'run' and the green boxes are the 'sum' boxes. So to find the answer, the numbers in the run boxes must add to the number in the sum box. The run boxes always are to the right or below the sum box which is split in half. If the number appears on the top of the sum box then you find the run to the right, if the number is in the bottom half of the sum box then you find the run below it. You can only use a number once in each run, meaning you can't use 4+4 to get 8, it would have to be 3+5, 2+6, ect. Corn-fused?

Let me use an example. Focus on the upper left section of the puzzle. The easiest way to go about solving the puzzle is to start with a corner and work from there. I usually start on the upper left. The next thing I look for is the smallest number with the smallest run. In this case, the 2x2 run for the 3, 8, & 16 are simple. The only two numbers which sum to 3 are 1 & 2 - so now it is a matter of figuring out which order they appear in.

The 8 is the next best area to sum, because we know the second box has to be 1 or 2, meaning the first box must be 6 or 7. To find out though, the 16 comes into play. If the first box were a 6, then that would mean the second box would have to be 10 in order to sum 16, since 1-9 are the only numbers allowed we can eliminate the 6 and we are left with the number 7. Since the number 7 goes in the first box of the 8 run that means the second box must be 1, which means the second box of the 3 run must be 2, ect..

The 41 obviously has many more numbers in the run, but I find that it is usually easier to move to another part of the puzzle and solve another area, just as demonstrated. I save the larger numbers until the end and find it is easiest for me.

Anyway, this is one of the first kakuro puzzles around the Northwest United States, but hopefully it isn't the last. Laura and I enjoy doing mathematical puzzles like this to find caches and hopefully others will try to create one as well. The puzzles can be easier than this particular puzzle, or they can be much hard and take hours, if not days, to solve.

If you aren't bored out of your mind after reading the mathematical explanation behind solving the puzzle then perhaps you can give the puzzle a try and see how you do. It took Laura and I around an hour to figure it out, and we felt we had some good skills with solving these types of puzzles. Heck, you can try to figure out the coordinates if you want. Just fill in the letters in the coordinates with the corresponding numbers from the puzzle. Here's a hint though, the coordinates are in Missoula, Montana.

N 4A'BC.DEF W 11G'0H.IJK

That does it for me. I think it's harder to explain the puzzle than it is to solve it! I need to not think for awhile. I better clean or fix something! Until again

-=Nolan=-

Friday, January 19, 2007

Weekend Reminiscence

The apartment is finally back to being organized. Yes, it's true, we actually can live comfortably again. You can see that we had a mess for awhile, but we slowly found a place for everything and we are back in working shape. I'm a little embarrassed to show the picture, but this was the morning after we arrived home and just threw everything in the living room so it wouldn't freeze in the car. I was going through some pictures and found a few more pictures of our hike this summer in Yellowstone. The night picture wasn't taken on our hike, it was actually taken by another photographer and is one of the photos you might see at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming. The fires in 1988 nearly burned the cabin down, but it was saved by placing sprinklers around the cabin. The flag pole was constructed in 2001 from one of the burnt trees from the fire. Tom Brokaw and his wife were there the first time the flag was hoisted. This is a place I could spend a lot of time and it would never grow old to me.Laura and I are excited to start hiking this summer, but that is still several months away, so until then we just have to reminisce the Thorofare hike.

This weekend Laura and I are hoping to do a little geocaching as long as the weather cooperates with our plans. Otherwise we don't have much else planned, but we are also looking forward to having a weekend with nothing to do and nowhere to go! Have a great weekend. Until again

-=Nolan=-

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Back To The Grind..... Or Not

It is amazing how many things can happen in a month, especially when you are not home. I called my boss to find out what the story was with work... Turns out they did a lot more than they had expected and the other people that were hired to work with me were just finishing up their work as well. So basically the major work is done and our services are no longer needed. However, he did inform me that he has a few more jobs around Missoula in the coming months and he might need some temporary help again. So in the mean time, I am going through my 'to do' list I have here at home and crossing off odd jobs around the house. I picked up our pile of mail from the post office yesterday and unpacked a few more things from the trip. I think that about finishes the unpacking and now I need to just finish organizing where everything belongs.

I thought I would share a wonderful experience Laura and I encountered while we were geocaching around Cheyenne last week. We had the Subaru, or as my family has dubbed it Canubaru (Canoe-Baru), and we were driving around trying to find a place to get to the cache about a mile away. We determined the cache to be out in the middle of a large field which is owned by the state of Wyoming, meaning it is accessible to the public. We found a road in, and at the bottom of the hill the road had some deep ruts which I didn't think the Canubaru would be able to make it through, so I decided to go to the side of the road and go around the ruts. Turns out the road was actually built up a little so as not to flood I guess - anyway, there was a nice drift and..well... oops. I think it is evident from the picture that we were not exactly close to town, and we were not going to be finding any help readily available. Even though the Canubaru is All-Wheel Drive it has trouble driving through 18 inch snow drifts which are thirty feet wide. Good thing we carry small extending shovels in the vehicles, and this is actually the first time we have had to dig the car out. Oh, and by the way, we didn't find that cache, it was still about half a mile in and if you examine the picture a little more you can see that there are some drifts as you go up the hill in front of the car.

Laura and I were looking forward to finding all the caches we could, so we would be closer to that glorious 1,000 mark, but as I said yesterday the weather just wasn't in our favor. Anyway, we had been passing a few cachers here in Montana who also are working on the 1,000 mark and we had moved up to the 6th spot overall in Montana. Well, in recent days, they have been traveling and now we are back to 8th and actually behind by well over a dozen finds. That's okay though, it's not a competitive game and you really get nothing more than self satisfaction for finding caches. Actually, on Saturday evening Laura and I are going to be attending a geocaching party and they everyone will be there, I am sure there will be talk of the close race we have going and some good humor over the issue as well.

That does it for me today. Until again

-=Nolan=-

Monday, January 15, 2007

Home Again Home Again Jiggidy Jig

We've finally made it! 3,195 miles later we are right back where we started - Missoula, Montana. After a month of living out of a suitcase and having no routine, we are happy to be back to 'our space' in our apartment. Albeit small, far from family and friends, and a mess from everything we have unpacked, we are happy to be back. Now don't go thinking I am falling in love with the world of Missoula, oh no, far from it. That was apparent within five minutes of exiting the Interstate and driving across town - not more than ten blocks off the Interstate and some idiot spinning his truck tires pulled out right in front of us and forced a sudden stop by slamming on the breaks. Welcome back I guess.... My original point was, we are happy to be back where our stuff is and where we don't have to use stuff which doesn't belong to us, although it was generously offered and appreciated, it's always nice to have our stuff.

I want to share a picture I took in Cheyenne last week when temperatures we around 35 degrees and we braved the cold to venture outdoors once again. Laura and I were geocaching at Lions Park, watching the geese and ducks mill around in the frigid water. Suddenly, I had an urge to swim amongst the waterfowl and so I took my hat, gloves and coat off and began running towards the small patch of open water still untouched by the ice cold hand of Mother Nature. As I ran, kicking my shoes and socks off, and pulling off my shirt, I came to a sudden stop as my eye caught a sign posted on the beach. Sadness overtook me as I read "NO SWIMMING CLOSED FOR THE SEASON." As you can see, the water was ideal for swimming and the ice fisherman watching the geese fly overhead was waving me on, but I decided to get dressed and go find other recreational activities.

Laura and I did some geocaching around Cheyenne on Monday and Tuesday when temperatures were warmer. We finished the trip with 960 caches found, no where near the 1000 we had wanted to have, but considering the weather wasn't cooperative we can be happy with what we did find.

Laura and I left Cheyenne a little after 7:00 in the morning on Saturday. We drove I-25 to I-90 and straight on to Missoula. We stopped for gas three times and once for some food in Sheridan, Wyoming. We spent about 30 minutes at Arby's and five minutes each for the fuel fill-ups, totally around 45 minutes outside of the car. We made the 800 mile trip from Cheyenne to Missoula just shy of 12 hours.

We were excited to arrive home and start unpacking the car. As I unpacked, Laura made some food and attempted to organize the mess I was bringing in from the car. To our surprise, Brooklyn (the dog) was waiting for us when we got home. She is moving away today with her owner and we are a little sad to have such a nice neighbor (and dog) move away but she has found herself a good job and those are hard to find around here.

Laura's at the school today getting her work started again and I am doing some final unpacking and organizing details around the house. Last night I called my boss about working today, but he had his phone turned off and I left a message to call. I have a feeling, with temperatures hovering at 5 degrees right now, and a high of 10 today, in addition to the fact it is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, that no work is being done today and things will start up again tomorrow. I did buy a new pair of coveralls in Cheyenne - they were on clearance and are a little heavier than my other pair, so I should stay even warmer!

With that in mind, I have a few things to get done around the house before Laura comes home and is ready to get some groceries. Have a good day, and stay warm, it appears most of the country is a little colder than usual! Until again

-=Nolan=-

Monday, January 01, 2007

Happy New Year

So much happens when you go on vacation. So much that I have a feeling it would take a few hours to blog all the excitement that has gone on around here lately. I'm blogging from Kearney, Nebraska during our busy and exciting vacation. Too bad it's half over.

I figured I would get everyone up to date and get a fresh start with the new year. It is going to be tough remember it is now 2007...

Laura and I made it to Cheyenne with out and problems. The roads were good and we arrived around 11:00 pm. The next morning we woke up to several inches of fresh snow on the ground. For the next few days the snow came down and the wind blew, thus creating a really snowy mess to get around in. That wasn't much of a problem because we are finishing the basement and we were able to stay warm and work inside without any trouble. We had about two dozen caches to find in Cheyenne, but the snow made it nearly impossible to find them, so we didn't do any geocaching while we were there the first week.

We went to Mullen on Christmas Eve and drove a new stretch of highway which we had never traveled together. We drove around Lake Mcconaughey and saw the lake in the winter time. A new sight for us as well. We even added another county together - Arther Co., which is one of the smallest populated counties in Nebraska.

For Christmas we spent the day in Stapleton and then drove home to Kearney that evening. We drove another small stretch of highway to highlight on our map as well. We arrived in Kearney around 8:00 pm Christmas night and the GPS showed we had traveled about 1450 miles.










We did some geocaching on Tuesday afternoon with Andy & Amber and then Laura and I received haircuts from my sister. We are looking a lot better now! We did some more geocaching on Thursday in Hastings and found 42 caches, bringing us to 940 caches at the end of 2006. Friday and Saturday brought a storm to Kearney and covered everything in several inches of ice. We lost electricity the entire day of Sunday, but others lost power Saturday afternoon. Power came back to us on Sunday night so we were fortunate to have some modern luxuries. Our car was covered in several inches of ice after the storm and we had to use a hammer to break it free. Here's the pictures:The antenna: 3 inch ice ball on the end.The trees didn't take to the ice very well either. These are the trees that set behind the new house, they were never exactly attractive, but they are really ugly now! Actually, there were a few things that didn't do very well with the ice and wind. The large tower that has set west of our old house for 20+ years fell over in the ice storm. It was one of those towers you can see from miles and miles away as you drive across Nebraska. I woke up and looked out the window and noticed the tower wasn't there. Sure enough, it was laying in a pile on the ground! I haven't taken any pictures yet, but hopefully I will get some soon.

Not much to say today. Nebraska plays Auburn in the Cotton Bowl, and as long as we can keep our electricity I think everyone will be content to see the game. I wanted to wish everyone a happy new year, so here's the message to you all!Happy New Year! 2007! GO HUSKERS!

Until again

-=Nolan=-