Thanksgiving is over.

It's hard to believe that over a week has gone by since I started the last entry. Something came up and I had to leave. Since then we have enjoyed a great Thanksgiving dinner prepared by Brad. This is the first year that Brad's dad was missing. He moved to Montana a few months back and I did not even get a chance to ask about him. Brad's mom and her new hubby Rob were there. I had not seen Sue or Rob since Brad and Maija got married last fall.
Winter is really setting in this year. We are just lucky the price of oil has gone down a bit from what it was this past spring. So far we have had 2 snaps below zero and about a foot of snow. I've been supplementing our heat with our wood stove but it is a real bear of a stove. I think I found one problem that was keeping it from burning very well but it still burns way too much wood for the amount of heat it puts out. We only heat the house to 64 during the day and 62 at night so when we are sitting around watching a movie in the evening it gets pretty chilly. We still do not have enough snow for good snowmobiling out back. I checked it out this afternoon and found the lakes are covered with overflow and the snow is not deep enough to cushion the rocks that you tend to hit in the trails. Overflow is a real problem because slushy ice will build up on the snowmobile to the point where it can not move. It catches you by surprise because the condition happens even at subzero temperatures, like today.
Mary got into an exercise group and a quilting group this fall. She put herself on a diet last summer and dropped quite a few pounds. She had been walking to the post office at least once a week during the summer but when the cold came she stopped walking outside and started using the treadmill. She got tired of that pretty fast so when they started a new exercise group she joined. She has made some new friends and one of them has a husband that is kind of like me so we get together once a week or so to play cards. The couple mush dogs like most Willow residents. They use the old dogs that other mushers don't want anymore. They have about 12 mushing dogs and then 5 dogs that live in the house with them.
I plan on updating the blog more frequently during the winter. I just finished updating the operating system on my main desktop computer and will probably update the webserver in the coming week. I do plan on revising the website again because the remote webcam in the goat barn just didn't work.
So time to fix some supper and feed the animals. More later.