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Driving home from town, I was cruising along the shore of Flathead Lake and felt like I had to stop to take this picture.

It looks like it could be a pleasant summer evening. But it was 20 degrees…

As Pepper and I were teaching seminary today, we decided to help these yahoos prepare to serve missions. The boys are eligible to serve at age 18, which means many of them will apply and head out right after graduating from high school. For some of them, that’s not very far away.

How to best do this? After a bit of thought, we decided to ask some missionaries we know who are serving right now. Not only are they nearly the same age as the kids in our class, but they’re living the mission experience in today’s crazy world. You can’t get much more relevant than that. I sent emails to a half-dozen young men (and one niece) who are serving now, asking for their input about what sorts of things they did to prepare for their missions, what sorts of things they wished they’d done, and what sorts of questions they get from people on the street.

Zaque answered promptly, and said he had so much to share that it would be easier in a video call. We dialed in right away and had an awesome hour-long chat with him about his life as a missionary.

This kid. He even pulled out the scriptures to quote some stuff for us!

He had a lot of great (and very wise) advice, and I was furiously taking notes so we can share it in seminary over the coming weeks…

So my best friend Nooch has a YouTube channel, and he recently hit 500 subscribers. That’s something of a milestone for him (at 1,000 subscribers he can apparently “monetize” the channel), and he decided that to celebrate, he’s going to start selling “merch”. His screen name is nooch2gud, which I’ve never fully understood, but I guess his fans think it’s the best.

Since I’ve been helping him with some artwork, he sent me a complimentary nooch2gud t-shirt. I decided to model it in a variety of poses.

Here’s hoping he hits 1,000 subscribers soon, because I might get a nooch2gud pillow! (Yes, really.)

After a few days of cloudy skies, it was great to see a gorgeous sunset over the lake. There are a few inches of snow on the ground, and the light was beautiful, so I stepped outside and snapped a few photos.

Here are the Christmas lights in our tree:

A bit of snow on the pine needles:

And a view to the southwest, across the lake beyond the forest:

I love living in a place where I can step outside the front door… into the forest… and see the beauty of nature.

Pepper always impresses me with her dedication. She’s the kind of person who will decide to do something, and then do it regardless of how difficult or uncomfortable it is. For example, many moons ago she decided to take up jogging. She started out and absolutely hated it. I wondered, does anyone really enjoy jogging? Well, apparently after a while you do. She grew to enjoy it, and she’d jog for miles every day. That habit eventually faded after a few years, but it shows the kind of dedication she has to something.

Well, now she’s decided to work on some new hobbies. She told me that if she practices these hobbies just fifteen minutes a day, she’ll get better. True. So last week she started.

The ukelele:

The piano:

And sign language:

In the photo above, she’s watching an ASL series and learning new words. But she prefers talking with Kyra, who’s quite adept at ASL after a couple of college classes:

I have no idea if her sign language is improving, but she definitely sounds better on the uke. It’s pretty cool to see her carving out the time each day to get better at something.

One of my favorite things about the Christmas season is the sending (and receiving) of cards. There are many, many people who only hear from me once a year. And by “hear from me” I mean “receive a goofy card with a handful of pictures on it”. So yeah, I could definitely do a better job of keeping in touch with my friends and family. Good intentions and all that.

Anyway, after sending some three hundred cards, it’s fun to get a few in return. This year’s “haul” amounted to seventy cards which currently decorate an entire wall in our kitchen:

I love not only seeing the changes in peoples’ lives, but chuckling at those who put together a clever card or a funny message. In an age when most people slap a quick post on Facebook and call it a day, it’s nice to know there are many who still enjoy opening their mailbox to find a stack of envelopes from old friends.

As 2020 winds down, Pepper and I decided to end it in style. We headed over to Blacktail Mountain to try out our new snowshoes. It was a beautiful snowy day.

With all the snow on the trees, everything felt like shades of black and white…

After a good hike, we stopped at Tamarack Brewing, an excellent local restaurant.

With a hearty dinner in our bellies, we sat for a while in the hot tub and looked out over the snowy forest around us. Finally we relaxed on the couch with a big blanket and watched a movie.

Just for fun, I spent a little time drawing “our New Year’s Eve together”. Maybe someday it’ll make a nice children’s book.

It was a great end to the year, and we’re both looking forward (as is most of the world, I suspect) to 2021. Happy new year.

As we wandered the streets of Provo during Christmas week, I thought it would be fun to take some “urban art” photos. I didn’t have my real camera with me, so my phone stepped up. With a little post-processing, I think they turned out kind of cool.

We finished our walk with a stop at the bakery for some delicious doughnuts.

Kyra had to work during the Christmas break, and Alex and Kaitlyn headed to her parents’ house for Christmas, and Zaque is on a mission in Oklahoma. Since no one was coming to Montana to hang out with us, we thought it would be a blast to head down to Provo, Utah and spend the week with Kyra.

It turns out we were right! Her roommates had all left for the holiday break, and our plans to stay with relatives fell through (thanks, covid), so we crashed at her apartment with a sweet inflatable air mattress bed. We spent the days walking around the BYU campus and the town, playing board games, watching movies, and of course opening Christmas gifts.

We found a fountain that was creating frozen foam. Yeah, pretty cool. It looks like bubbles or foam in the picture, but it was actually ice. Very, very thin ice.

We also took a moment to watch the Great Conjunction, where Jupiter and Saturn met in the twilight sky. Without any real equipment or even a zoom lens, this is the best I could do:

Provo has a cool store called Good Move where you can spend a few hours eating food and playing board games. They claim to have a thousand games, and indeed there were a lot, but I’m not sure there were that many.

Pepper quickly grew bored of the games (she’s just not a big gamer) so she walked back to the apartment while Kyra and I spent a few hours playing. We probably wasted 30-40 minutes attempting to set up and play Dice Forge, but the rulebook– or rather rule sheet— was so convoluted we literally couldn’t figure out how to play.

So we gave up and tried Kingdomino, which proved to be a bunch of fun.

Our Christmas loot was a small pile, but loaded with fun. Kyra was thrilled to open her phone screen protector…

… because it meant one of her other gifts was the phone itself. She’s been using a pretty old low-end one for a few years, and was happy to finally upgrade to something modern. Well, not entirely modern; I bought a model that’s several years old, because it’s just silly to buy a brand new late-model phone these days.

I ended up with a couple of nice shirts. One was from Eddie Bauer (well, not Eddie himself, but from Mom and Dad).

And the other was from Kyra, who had the bright idea of custom-printing a shirt with one of my comics on it, Squirrel Suit Guy.

Pepper ended up with a ukelele from me, since she’s shopping for a hobby and seemed interested in Zaque’s.

Then, of course, in keeping with Christmas tradition we had take-out sushi for lunch.

I’m kidding. Who has take-out sushi on Christmas Day? Apparently my wife and daughter. I enjoyed some grilled cheese instead.

We had an opportunity for a video call with Zaque, and wow that hair…

I’m pretty sure that’s not “mission appropriate” but with covid, haircuts are a weird business and apparently he’s been able to slip it through the administrative cracks. Kyra’s internet connection kept barfing, leading to many moments during the call that looked like this (notice all of us laughing in the corner):

We made some homemade pizza and celebrated the holiday with some bubbly. When Kyra opened it, the foam exploded all over the table. As a college student, she’s learned not to waste good food, and that led to this.

Not surprisingly, the week was a grand time. Merry Christmas to all.

If there’s one common thread in all the house projects we’ve pursued this year, it’s been that contractors are really, really busy. The latest victim is our solar contractor, who kept delaying our installation until we’ve now reached a point where the weather will make it impossible to install the panels until late spring.

That leaves us with a garage with twenty thousand dollars’ worth of solar panels…

I suppose we wouldn’t generate that much power from the winter sun anyway, but it’s disappointing to have to wait until six months after our planned installation date…