Back From the North Country

New Year’s has come and gone. The Christmas music is finally silent, I think this is the first year I really got sick of hearing it. Of course, part of the reason might be that they started playing it before Thanksgiving. We took down the Christmas tree Sunday so that really ends the season for us with Epiphany.

We traveled to Salt Lake City on Saturday after Christmas to help our daughter Carlee and family unpack boxes and get settled in their new house. Really it was to give everyone a break from the moving. Tom took Jack skiing on the day we drove up. Later Carlee and I would hit some of the sales and exchange some Christmas gifts. You know, do what we women love to do when the men have the kids, shop!

One day after getting the china cabinet and laundry room in order, Bob and I were able to escape for lunch and wander around Barnes and Nobles Book Store. The kids were in daycare, Carlee was in So. California on business and Tom was at work. So everyone had some time for work and play.

There was plenty of snow and ice in Utah. The solid snow ground cover and cold weather started just south of Cedar City and continued all the way north on our trip. We stopped at our house in Cedar City and everything had a light covering of snow as you can see in the photos. We were thankful the roads were clear and dry all the way until we got to the city streets. I was a bit nervous driving on the snow, it’s been quite a while since my Wisconsin snow driving days. So while Bob drove I knit on a scarf for Katie Jane.

We had second Christmas after our arrival as you can see from the Spider man costume. No, I did not make it. Carlee came through with a nice gift certificate for me to Three Wishes, a weaving and knitting shop in West Jordan. You can believe that got spend before we headed home. Kristine has some beautiful yarns at Three Wishes.


The kids’ new house has a strange cubby hole in the bathroom off the rec room. It’s about 4 cubic feet, carpeted, and has its own light and door. Jack likes to go in and watch movies on his DVD player. One afternoon Jack shared his cubby hole with Bob and they watched that riveting classic movie, “Transformers”. Jack had to explain all the characters to Bob. The picture of the two of them in their cubby is actually kind of cute. Katie Jane had been sitting in Bob’s lap, but she never stays in one place too long, and didn’t get in the picture.


We left SLC on New Year’s Eve day on a bright, cold day. While it was in the low 30’s in SLC, when we drove by the Scipio exit at 10:30 AM it was 15 degrees outside. The scenery was absolutely beautiful. Everything, trees, brushes, grasses, was covered in frost. It looked like a scene from “Dr. Zhivago”.

By the time we got to Cedar City the temperature was in the low 40s and we found activity at our house. The construction crew was framing the rooms in the basement in their tee shirts while Carl was in the small Cat digging out snow next to the basement walls. It was exciting to finally see the layout of the rooms in the basement. The two bedrooms seemed small, sigh, but the sewing/weaving room and family room seemed pretty good sized, yeah! What I had done with the floor plan was take the total length of the first bedroom and adjoining family room and move the bedroom wall to make the two rooms about the same width. Oh yes! While not huge the craft room will definitely be bigger than the room I use presently. I’ll probably fill that room up to the rafters too.