Every Monday night for a half hour or so we have Family Home Evening, where the family gets together and one of us gives a gospel-centered lesson while the rest of us torture the cat, gaze at the ceiling, tell Sarah to GO SIT DOWN every twelve seconds, etc. Last night Mom helped Natalie (age 5) put together a lesson about Building a Happy Home. Part of the lesson was all of us TOGETHER actually building one house out of blocks. Of course right off the bat Natalie and Emma opted not to help with the group project in favor of building their own towers, and Becca flew Jacob around in the empty block box; but Katie, Abby, Sarah, and I built a pretty fancy block house in four minutes flat.

Of course you can’t see it here because Becca put her head in the way. That’s the beauty of point-n-shoot digital cameras: You can press the button whenever you want, but the picture snaps whenever it wants. And since a group of kids will change configuration about every millisecond, you never know what you’ll get when the camera decides to take the picture.

Here’s what we got, clockwise from Becca’s head: Becca’s head, Katie, the Abby/Sarah blob, Emma, Natalie, and Jacob.

But that’s life with kids. It was a great lesson.

I had to get on the roof.

When I get sick to my stomach I get really sick. Violently sick. It’s icky. And the timing was rather poor for the violently-icky illness I had over the holiday, because our chimbley was clogged* and I had to get on the roof to fix it. Until I could do that, the stove wouldn’t work, which meant no heat in the house.

I had to get on that roof in the morning or my family would freeze. The roof had an inch of weak snow and was sparkling with slippery frost. Metal roof. 9:12 pitch. Eaves are, oh, 10 feet off the hard-frozen ground. This is not typically something you want to do when you’ve been up all night with vomiting, diarrhea and acute abdominal pain.

At 2:57 am that morning I had to call for a priesthood blessing. Whether you believe in such things or not, the blessing worked for me. I felt much better the next morning and got outside to do the job.

In the shot above, the spot in the dead center is me. You see the jury-rigged ladder I keep on the roof, and the extension ladder we set up to access it. I was stretched out on the roof in the gap between the two ladders when I realized I wasn’t entirely well. Not a good situation. But I prayed for help, got up to the ridge, crawled over to the chimney, and finished the job.

I came back down thanking the Lord, restarted the fire, and went to bed.

If you’re like Dawnalee and live on the 4th floor in the city, at least you don’t have to do stuff like this to ensure your family stays warm. For me, well, this kind of thing is worth it if I get to live under the stars.

*How did the chimbley get clogged? Well, when I was installing it, I dropped the chimney cap. It slid down the roof and hit the ground at Mach 2, which is what I would have done if I’d lost my balance the other day. So the cap was dented when I installed it, and it clogs readily. Not helpful for a $60 chimney cap. I replaced it with an $8 job I got at the local farmer’s co-op, and the new one has at least ten times the air clearance. So I’ll still be cleaning the chimney every year, just not the cap.

It’s been a great adventure putting this blog together over the past, oh, nine months. I thought it would die out in July, but it just keeps growing. Thank you, followers and lurkers, for your suggestions and input. I would love love love to hear from each of you, but in the meantime you can hear from us, every day I’m at work.

And, in defiance to the miasma of political correctness, Merry Christmas!

Doug and Jessica

WHAM!-thmp.

I pulled over as quick as I could and left the Jeep running. The windshield wipers kept windshield-wiping, vvvvvgungk. vvvvvgungk. I got out to see the damage.

A smashed turn-signal lens, a cracked grill, a big shallow dent in the door (which I didn’t even see until later), and some deer hairs. This is not the stuff of catastrophic accidents. While I looked, here came a pickup pulling up right behind us, his headlights glaring in. I walked back to see who came, and lo and behold it’s my friend Steve from work. He volunteered to help and grabbed a pair of gloves and a cell phone to use as a flashlight. (At night when it’s overcast, it’s darker than the inside of a cow around here.) Blood flowed from under the doe’s head, and her eyes were still open. We each took one glove, grabbed a leg, and hauled her off to the side of the road.

It’s sad.

It’s sadder that I can’t use the meat. I go hunting and don’t see boo, but this is the third deer I’ve killed driving a vehicle. We’re not allowed to use that meat; we have to let it rot at the side of the road. Go figure.

But that doe was heavy. Think about it. On three separate occasions I’ve been travelling at sixty miles an hour or better, and collided with a 150-pound weight atop 30” spindly legs,. And this is all the damage I’ve sustained?

I have to conclude that somebody’s watching out for me.

This is their fifth such mission; the others were in Missouri, Wisconsin, China, and Armenia. They are now 72 years old.

My parents raised seven children through the difficult years of the 1960s and 70s. They endured many lean years, business failures, disappointments, and other struggles. Through it all, they have remained faithful and devoted to the Lord, each other, and their children. One of their greatest contributions to the world is their sterling example of a loving couple married for good.

In this day of pandemic selfishness, my parents are a terrific example to the world that marriages can last, and be happy, regardless of the storms of life. Jess and I look up to them for that (as well as being fabulous grandparents for our children), and in that way we hope to be just like them.

Happy anniversary, Mom and Dad. I love you.

I barely registered a gray blur on my right before a heavy slam shook the whole car. My head jerked back in time to see, out of the tail of my left eye, a remarkable sight. A deer was in the air, sailing back and to my left like a ball tossed over the shoulder. Its mouth was open. It must have been the companion of the one I’d seen on the left, jumping in front of me while I was distracted, and was thrown in the air by the force of the impact. I must have glanced forward and back again, because the next I saw the animal was tumbling forward on the left side of the highway, over and over itself like a tumbleweed, in a horrible uncontrolled cartwheel that surely broke its back.

I stopped the music and the car. I was already a quarter mile away from the point of impact, and the deer’s body was invisible in the grass. I got out to inspect the damage. Dexter’s hood was caved in and kinked open a little; but he still idled quietly, his headlights still burned, and no fluid seemed to be leaking from underneath.

I got back in the car and drove to my assignment, subdued and grateful. A deer has significant body mass perched up on thin legs. My Honda was moving fast, low to the ground, with a sloping hood and a cracked windshield. How is it that the deer did not come up and at me through the windshield? Why was the damage not more severe? How is it that in that river valley an elk or–heaven forbid–a moose did not find me instead?

We both know, of course. God looks after His children, just as any good father does. Those who by a queer and pitiable blindness do not believe in God would seem forced to rely rather heavily on coincidence.