I’ve deleted all the trash e-mail, read what little e-mail remained, looked through the websites that I usually visit regularly, fixed a couple of upgrade problems on my blog, and now it’s time to do a little writing before the evening comes to an end. We’ve had some snow today — mostly a snow squall — that coupled with the wind deposited about eight inches of snow right in front of the garage door. The rest of the driveway was bare. It took about a half-hour to run the snow blower and clean off the front walk before having dinner. We could use a lot more snow but none is in the forecast for the next week. The continuing cold weather, however, is definitely still in the forecast. A high pressure ridge on Canada’s west coast, coupled with a big low pressure off the Oregon / California cost, has the jetstream going way south along the California coast before heading east. As a result, all the moisture is in the deep south and the frigid Arctic cold has the middle of the country in the very deep freeze. This pattern also shows no sign of changing any time soon.

My brother Perry (see his blog through the link on the right) and his wife Chris went to Soda Springs last weekend, so Nina and I drove over on Saturday to visit. We sure enjoy spending time with Perry and Chris. He will be starting chemotherapy in January. He’s been diagnosed with a treatable but uncurable form of a lymphoma. He’s young, healthy, and the disease was found in the very early stages, so the longer term prognosis is pretty good. It’s possible that a good treatment will become available in time to restore his quality of life. We certainly hope so. Meanwhile, he and I are in the process of putting high-speed internet into our parent’s home in Soda Springs. They don’t really do a lot with the Internet except e-mail and a very little web browsing, but when we visit we’re looking forward to being able to take our laptop computers and have a good high-speed internet connection. Their current dial-up provider has wireless available in town, but some trees in the neighborhood are blocking the line-of-sight to the two access points. DSL is not available anywhere in the town from Qwest (and probably never will be — as that phone company simply won’t invest in these small towns). There is a small independent cable company that offers a cablemodem option (they don’t seem to have a web page!) so that’s the option we’ve chosen. I’ll put a Netgear Wireless Firewall/Router in after the cable company completes their work and another household in America will have high-speed wireless internet.

Perry and Chris brought mom and dad with them on Sunday evening to Pocatello for the annual Highland Stake Messiah Sing-Along. We all took our music scores with us and spent two hours with a small orchestra, supurb soloists, and some 600 other people singing The Messiah. Perry is also a bass, so we sat together in the bass section and had a great time. It helped immensely that there were a couple of very strong bass voices behind us. The annual sing-along is a Christmas event that I thoroughly enjoy every year. When we were living in the Ogden area, the second Sunday of December was their annual Messiah Sing-in followed on the third Sunday with a Christmas Carol sing-in. A thousand or more people would gather in the Ogden Tabernacle on the third Sunday to sing almost every known Christmas carol accompanied by that lovely pipe organ with readers intersperced reciting Christmas poetry. That’s another event that I’ve longed for since we moved away from Ogden. It sure helps to instill a true Christmas spirit centered around the birth of our Savior rather than the commercial Santa Claus.

All else is very quiet (and cold). The day is done and so am I. Merry Christmas!