Baby, it's cold outside

Today the temperature (according to our backyard thermometer) got up to 34, the first time the mercury has crawled above freezing for at least a week.

In other news, today Andrew headed back down to Provo to start the second semester.  頑張れアン君！

Happy Birthday 75

Today was Dad's 75th birthday.  (It was also Yumiko's dad's birthday; he would have been 80.)

In the evening Jeff's family and we went over for cake, ice cream, and donuts.  Mom gave Dad a couple of long-sleeved flannel shirts, and we gave him the first season of the British TV show Sherlock on DVD.

I hope he had a good birthday.

I hope they call me on a mission

Photo for Andrew's missionary application.

Starting over

On or about June 15, 2008, I set up an iTunes smart playlist for all songs in my library (other than "Sunday" hymns and Christmas music) so that I could listen to everything in the library with no repeats. (Technically, it was for all songs that had been played once or less, so new songs added since I started the playlist got played twice.)  Yesterday, about four and a half years later, the playlist finally ran dry.  Today I started listening to the playlist again (now set for all songs with less than three plays).  We'll see how long it takes to get through this time.

Happy New Year!

New Year's Eve we had the traditional Japanese toshikoshi soba for dinner.  It was really good.

Lisa and Daniel went to the Church-sponsored youth dance, then afterward went to our bishop's house for a pancake breakfast.  (Rachel and Justin went back to Provo the day after Christmas.)  That left just Andrew, Yumiko, Sunny, and I to count down and toast the new year with sparkling apple cider (and cat food for Sunny).

Welcome to 2013!

Closet Chronicles

A couple of years ago we closed off a portion of the big unfinished storage room in the basement and turned it into a guest room.  Since you can never have too much storage space, we made one end of the room into two closets.  However, we haven't done anything with them since, so they're less useful than they could be.

Since I had a week and a half (unpaid...) vacation over Christmas and New Years, it seemed like a good time to finally install some shelves.  We decided to go with Rubbermaid wire shelving, like we put in Rachel and Lisa's room a year or so ago (except that most of what we put in these are 20" deep shelves, rather than the more 12" shelves that came in the kits we used there).  It's not the cheapest solution, but it is fairly easy to install, it's adjustable, and it's quicker than building and painting wood shelves.

Here's how it turned out.

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

And now guests have a place to hang up clothes!

Snowfall

Bogus Basin still doesn't have a lot of snow, but they're open, and we went up for the first time a couple of days after Christmas.  Here are a few photos.  Regan and Hadyn came too, but I somehow failed to get any usable photos of them.

Lisa spent most of the time hanging out with some "Asian friends," so we didn't see much of her after they met up.

It was cold and a bit foggy, and there were still quite a few bushes and weeds that haven't been covered up yet, but it was a pretty fun day nonetheless!