We have a HUGE praise for the camp as a whole - the camp's phone system is old, complicated and constantly breaking down. Jim Raymond was the only one who had a clue how it worked, but he left this past fall. Every time they dig lately they seem to break through a phone line. There is a huge need to redo the whole system AND have some of our guys learn how to do some basic phone work so they can keep up the system themselves. Having the phone company out to fix things gets VERY expensive VERY quickly! We did end up having them out recently and after about 3 hrs of work they could still not get the line working correctly. The guy who came out was willing to come to camp on a volunteer basis on his own time, but needed approval from his employers to do that. They agreed AND he was able to recruit a bunch of other people to come out as well! They will be coming out to rework our whole system! This will save the camp MANY thousands of dollars of work and will be such a HUGE help to make our system more reliable and easier to maintain. Yeeehaw!!! Merry Christmas, Victory!
I don't have a lot more news so I'll just post piles of pictures which everyone prefers anyway :) First are Christmas pictures of each of the kids - Andrei still in pjs getting $ for clothes (boring, but no way parents can pick out that stuff, and that's all he wanted).
Oksana with a new MP3 player - this is her third. She CONSTANTLY has the music going, so she burns through them pretty quickly. The new chairs were given to us recently. They need work, including new covers, but at least we can all actually sit on chairs until we find something we really like. Then they'll make good chairs for the shack in the back!
Sergei got tools to help him fix all the things he breaks. Well, hopefully to fix them and not make things worse.
Ellie's Christmas, but don't let it fool you. She actually spent most of the day outside RUNNING and having a BLAST! She just came inside to warm up in between runs. It's a rough life. What I don't get is how she doesn't fit in that bed, but Eider, who is twice her size, can curl right up in there. And someone forgot to tell Ellie that Bassets are supposed to be fat and lazy. That dog LOVES to run! She went with the boys up to the spring the other day (WAY up the hill through snow deeper than she is tall) and she STILL wanted to run and run and run after she came back!
Ummm, someone needs a hair cut! I lined them all up last night and got the clippers out after seeing this bad hair!
The shack in the back on Dec 20. The sun doesn't hit our house right now, but it isn't far from us! Our bedroom will get sun again before the downstairs will.
This picture shows our house fairly close to mid-day. You can see that the sun reaches just above the house. So solar panels just might work! The LED kitchen and dining room fixtures are on their way so we should be in even better shape with our electric usage soon! We may not even need solar panels if we can get our usage to drop enough!
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