North to Alaska

Well, we made it up to Alaska and only had a few minor setbacks, including being turned around and the Canadian border and having to come back in the morning. Nothing major, just that they didn't have any immigration on duty that night, so we slept in the truck in a small town in northern Montana and went through in the morning. The rest of the trip went smooth and we were all glad to get to our house. There was about 3 feet of snow around our house. Lucky for us, our neighbor had plowed our driveway a few times, so we were atleast able to walk down to our house.

We haven't gotten a lot done since we've been here. Bruce has been building a boat, so that takes a lot of time. I have gotten some staining/clear coating done. And, he got the insulation under our bedroom floor done. We even started to hang drywall on the ceiling. So, slowly, but surely we are getting there.

Both of the kids started school again and are doing well. They each get a turn riding the school bus to/from school. Dakota does swimming once a week. It's a program they do for all of the kids through 6th grade during school hours. It's nice that they get to learn to swim, especially with all the water around here. (Now if they just taught a bear self-defense class, we'd be prepared ;)

So, here are a few miscellaneous pictures from the past month.

Deshka, Olivia, and Dakota infront of their snowfort. We received about a foot of snow in the last day or so and the last snowfall was quite wet, so it packed really well. We decided to take advantage of it while we could.

Dakota crawling out of the entrance to their snow fort that we built today.

Joan Songer, a friend of ours, invited us over and she pulled the kids behind the fourwheeler on the big sled. Her grandson, Quincy was there too.

Dakota throwing snow and his unsuspecting sister. It wasn't very sticky snow that day, so it wasn't a great snowball, but I think it did hit her.

Olivia, eating snow

Bruce is building a river sciff so that we can go out on the lake and down the river fishing this summer. It's made from fiberglass. It's interesting what all goes into building one of these. Of course, this means that not as much is getting done on the house as we'd like, but it will.

The end of the cove by our house isn't frozen. So, I was able to take some pictures of the local winter wildlife. I got within 30 feet of them, hoping they've fly away and I could take pictures of them in flight, but all they did was honk at me.

After Bruce plowed our driveway, I deciede to take a picture of my car covered in snow. This is how it looked when we got to Alaska. There's about 3 feet of snow accumulated. Our neighbor decided to quit plowing our driveway because every time he did, it would dump a bunch of snow the next day. :)