Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Here are some carvings I finished earlier this summer but could not show you then because they were both gifts.

This first one was of a old Russian lady I seen in a newspaper article, I called it "Babushka", Russian for grandmother. It was a gift to my wife's sister's family, who has two adopted girls from Russia.





The other was for my wife's other sister's family, her husband has firefighter ties.




They were fun to do, and fun to give away. I've got some great in-laws and it's fun surprising them.

Saturday, December 20, 2008

The Sissies

Dateline 12/20/08, Allendale Michigan. A "severe" winter storm has hit the state leaving us all reeling and stranded in its wake. HA, sissies, look at me in the picture the snow is not even up to my knees, and they call that a storm?

This is going to date me, but I remember the winter of '77, now that was a snow storm. It was a total white out for three days solid, not man nor beast was out in that blow. Ok, so there was some one out; my dad, a co-worker and myself.

You see, my dad was one of those people that believed that if it was a work day it was our responsibility to make it to work, so off we went. The other guy, Bob G., picked us up in his truck and we headed for Hudsonville, at a crawl. M-45 was bad enough but when we got to 48th Ave. the road was completely drifted over, but did that stop us, shoot no we're from Michigan and it's only snow! Now 48th runs north and south and had some large open fields, which made those stretches of road even worse and one of these spots was just before the town of Bauer and that's where we got stuck, right out in the open blizzard. We piled out of the truck and with Dad and me pushing we managed to get moving again, only to break the fan belt, which was kind of a good thing because we had to hang out by a warm fire while the truck was fixed. Oh, we did make it to work that day, a little late, but we made it.

So anyway, the weather people these days seem to be always shouting doom and gloom when a storm heads our way but remember, it can always be worse, and after all we live in Michigan we can take it!