Beautiful New York Winter!

My new Christmas Present from The S. Pack's.
A George Forman Grill! We are really enjoying it!


Maybe Pun?? Phil?? (the groundhog) maybe didn't
see his shadow, but we finally did!!!

Breakfast at the Joseph Smith Frame House. I don't think
you are suppose to eat in there! We did anyway!


On the up side of the picture it is really hard to see the
real size of the tree. So Doug made me hike down into
the snow so he could get pictures from the other side.


I am about 1/3 of the way up the tree from the
root ball. The pictures just don't give you the
real perspective!


I'm hard to see up by the root ball because we are
both brown, but it is well above my head. Doug wanted me to
get down in front.... it was a hole filled with icy water.
No Way!!!


This tree is huge! The picture where I was standing back
in the middle of the tree... I'm not anywhere near this
picture. (Even though it looks like I am.) It has cruched
the fence and then goes on about another 20-30 feet!


All bundled up with no where to go... Notice the
beautiful neck scarf that LaRay made for me! Very
nice!!!


Freezing in the grove... Just wanted to prove we
were there! Besides the kids tell us to send pictures
of us on the blog...


The stream in the Sacred Grove... Very pretty!


Really??? Duh!!! Aren't some pictures worth a
thousand words!!! New Yorker must be really stupid!


This foamy ice sometimes goes for a mile out into
the lake. But it is really "airy" so you can fall through
it if you get out on it. People do every year they say!
This year it has been way to "warm" for much ice!


Some of the "foamy" ice along Lake Ontario. Look
at the tree trunks incrusted in ice down the shoreline.


This was a really big machine. It is an aquatic weed
harvestor. It is to get all the little weeds out of your
boat dock area and out of the "view area" of your house.


This looks like it works just like a potato combine does.
It cuts and digs up the weeds and then they travel on a conveyor
belt to the back where they are dumped into some kind of container.


This is Lake Ontario on a nice warm winter day!


Some homes on Sodus Point right on the Bay. Beautiful
and very pricey!! I could enjoy a summer in one of these!


That looks like water, but it is snow and ice all across
the bay. Sodus Bay off of Lake Ontario.

This is a "calendar" picture... it is so pretty... and cold!


Welcome to New York Boating... two boats and a really
big snowplow blade all in the same driveway!!!

This week we got us a new George Forman Grill for Christmas. (from the Steve Pack’s!) We have been trying to decide just what we needed and we decided that a GFG would be just great. It is. We have used it several times and it is wonderful. It is faster than normal so we can cook some meat in a hurry when we have only a short time for a meal. We are going to enjoy it a lot!

We had a couple of days with the sun out this week. One day it lasted almost the entire day. Because we hadn’t seen our shadows for so long, we decided to take a picture of them! Other than the fact that we look like bowling pins, and that Doug is still a little kid at heart (as the devil horns above my head evidence) it is a nice picture. I don’t know how Andrea has made it without daylight. It has really bothered me!!! But the white on the ground isn't snow... it is salt. They use a lot of salt!!!

On Monday morning this week, we were just putting along getting ready for "work" when a couple called us. They live out in Fayette and were assigned to work here in Palmyra, while we were assigned to be out in Fayette that day. Because of extremely bad weather the night before, and continuing bad weather that morning, they wanted to know if we could switch places with them… That was fine with us, but that meant that we had to be at our station in about 30 minutes instead of 2 hours 30 minutes!! We hurried as fast as we could and through some things into a bag for breakfast and off we went. We got to eat breakfast in the Joseph Smith frame home that morning. It was kind of nice. Because of the change of shift, we were able to run our errands in the afternoon and use the next day (which was our preparation day) to go way up north to Lake Ontario and find some inactive members! So it worked out perfectly!

Because of the bad windstorm, a really large tree was blown over in the grove. Doug and I braved the temperature of 13 degrees with a 20 MPH wind (making it somewhere between –2 and –7 degrees out!) so that we could get some pictures for the blog. The tree was pretty impressive, but in the pictures you just can’t get the idea of how BIG it was. I am sure that it was about 100 feet tall! It was really big, and it took out a couple of other trees on the way down. Like I said, it doesn’t look that big in the pictures, but hopefully you can get the idea. We tried to get some pictures with us in them so that you could have some "perspective" of it’s size. The trunk was about 2 ½ feet across (not around). Doug didn’t have on a very warm coat, so he about froze to death in the grove. I had on my winter coat, ear muffs, hood, mittens… I was toasty warm! Even with the cold, it was worth the walk through the grove. It was really pretty and very calm. Cold, but pretty. It took Doug about a half a day to warm back up!

Like I said, we went up to the Lake Ontario area to look for some inactive members of our ward on Tuesday. It is like looking for addresses in Yellowstone National Park! There are large areas of woods, then farms, then woods, and then woods some more. One family wasn’t home, but we did get one sister! She was home recovering from foot surgery. We were able to visit with her for about 45 minutes and I think it went very well. She invited us to come back and visit again anytime we would like. She also asked us if we would be willing to come up to have dinner with her and her husband some time. YES! Hopefully we can at least be friends to them and maybe make a difference in their activity someday. (Round trip to their house is about 110 miles so you have to have a day off just to get up there.) If they did come to church, it would take them about 45 minutes to get there! There home is a long way from anywhere… but it is in a beautiful spot. They are right on the edge of Sodus Bay in an area of heavy timber. (You had to drive down a driveway about a half-mile long to get to their house. We were a little concerned that it might be too snowy or muddy and we couldn’t get out, but all was well!) The Bay was iced over except for a small area of open water where hundreds of Canadian Geese were enjoying a relaxing dip in the FRIGID water!!! But it was really beautiful!

Because we were so very close to the lake, we continued on up the road about another 2 miles and came to the lakeshore. The first thing we decided was that New Yorkers must be really stupid! The end of the road had a huge STOP sign. Well, duh! If you didn’t stop you would be in Lake Ontario!!! We chuckled about that (again, we think we are really funny… that happens when you don’t have anyone but yourselves to entertain you!) but we didn’t chuckle for very long because it was so cold our faces were freezing. We got the pictures and got back into our Jeep as fast as we could. We can’t wait to go back in the summer and take a look around. It is beautiful!

The waters edge was all icy and some of the trees nearby were also covered in ice from the spray of the waves. They tell us that in a normal year, the ice flow goes out about a mile. But you can never go out on it because it is a "airy" ice and you will fall through. Every year many people fall through and drown (freeze to death probably first) because it looks so hard and thick… It’s not! It was pretty though (even if the water in the lake was so dirty). It looked like we were standing at the oceans edge because the lake was so big…. But we think of the ocean only being near warm sandy beaches and beautiful palm trees. This was a little different.

We also saw something else that I thought that the Idaho potato farmer in each of my family would enjoy. We saw a aquatic weed harvester… it was a boat and it looked like a potato combine. It floats along and cuts off all the weeds and then they move through a conveyer belt to be dumped into some type of container. Pretty neat. It wasn’t getting much use on the day we saw it, but maybe when we go back we can see it in action!

There were other beautiful sights that I have tried to include in the pictures. Other than that, we don’t have a lot going on. We got to have dinner with our ward Relief Society President and some other missionaries last night. It was a nice night out. We didin't get home till about 10 PM so it was a long day.

Doug is at the Hill doing financial stuff this morning, so I am taking the time to send my blog. We love and miss you all. We hope that you are all well and happy! We pray for you always. Leave us comments!!! All our love, dnd