Merry Christmas

We had a great Christmas even though we only had two of our children and their spouses who were able to come and visit us. We were able to celebrate an early Christmas with all of our grandchildren, however, so got to see them open presents, etc. We hope to get to Preston this week to see Heidi and Will. We've had lots of snow here in Mountain Home, more than we usually get. The roads to Preston have had lots of snow too, so hopefully we can get there.

We got a "Wii" for the Jensen house, so now the kids and grandkids will have something fun to play when they are here. Hopefully they will come often. Carol got an iPod so is trying to learn how to download some of her songs and books so she can listen to them while traveling.

We hope all our friends had a great holiday too.

Creche Display

Last weekend our stake presented a creche exhibit for the community. I was highly involved in helping set up, shared about 60 of my own creche displays, sang in the choir presenting the Messiah, Don and I served as hosts, and we were with the clean-up crew until the very end. We just found that the LDSinthenews web site caught wind of the exhibit and here's the link to our town newspaper telling about it. There were 713 individual exhibits and over 1000 visitors at the event.

Record Crowds Turn Out for Annual Creche Exhibit

Geocache ranking

I just found out there's an internet site that tracks a person's standing in the geo-caching world. it shows your ranking by number of caches found in the state. I found out that I am #40 in the state of Idaho in the number of caches found. That's pretty good, I think, considering I live in a fairly remote area with not nearly as many caches to find as people in the more populated areas. As of today we've found 1528 caches in the 3 years we've been caching. Winter will takes its toll on us as we won't get many caches. Brrrrr.

Giving Thanks

We were blessed to have our whole family together for Thanksgiving. Wendy graciously invited us to her new home in Eagle, ID and hosted dinner there for us. The kids had a great time running around and we all enjoyed eating and visiting. Here's the whole Jensen gang.

Deck-building

Don and Wendy are hard at work putting in the balisters for the deck railing. They did a great job.

All Decked Out!

Wendy and Don have been working hard to get the railing on our new deck completed before winter hits. They've made remarkable progress. That Wendy is quite a worker!

One of the pleasures of fall.

Our daughter Wendy and the kids came down one day to work on the deck. Kaylee, Spencer, Nicole, and I raked up the leaves, then Spencer used them for his bed. The pile would be MUCH larger now, if we raked them into a pile. Does he look like Big Bird in a nest?

Doesn't this look like fun?

Spencer and Kaylee had fun raking up the leaves and then playing in them.

Where are they now that the entire lawn is covered in leaves?

Our New Cache-Mobile

This is our new truck. We've only had it a month, but we've driven it out into the desert and up into the hills to sight-see and to geocache. We love it!

On Top of the World

After visiting Silver City, we did a few more geocaches in the area. This one took us to a place we could see over the entire valley. It was quite a site - and the photo doesn't do it justice. It's amazing where I can get to with just a couple of little sticks to help keep me from falling.

Silver City Ghost Town

While my brother, David Olsen, was here visiting in October, we took many day-trips to geocache and see interesting sights. Here we ae in Silver City, the best preserved Ghost Town in Idaho and possibly the nation. That's the church house behind us. It was quite a hike just to get up to the church. A person had to really want to go to church, to hike up that hill to get there!

1400th Geocache

While out geocaching on October 9th, we got our 1400th cache find. Since we just bought a new (used) truck with 4-wheel drive, we were able to drive quite close to this cache. It was out in the desert near Mountain Home. Can you believe we found this film canister in the desert among all this sagebrush? We must be good! We've been caching for 3 years now and still enjoy getting out and seeing places we've never been before.

My First Post

Heidi helped me create this blog, so I sure hope she'll be able to help me know how to manage everything here. But anyway, here's my first post!

I am excited to have a blog now, and hope to be able to share photos and stories, etc.

Carol's Birthday

I had a good birthday celebration. What better way to celebrate than with a cake made by Don, Heidi, and the grandkids! Aren't Wendy's kids cute?