Winter Break

The holidays are great when you are a student because you have the holidays off, Rhett had the whole week of Christmas off between rotations! Throughout our marriage, one of us always worked Christmas or Christmas Eve and it was great to both have it off this year and to be with family.

We took all the kids from Delta up to AF Canyon to sled at Tibblefork. I hadn't been since 2003 and it was awesome as usual. I always forget how draining it is to hike my saggy bum back up the steep mountain, but it was worth it. My camera ran out of batteries and I was so mad because I wanted a picture of the bowl up in the pines off the water...maybe another time.

My nephew likes to hunt and got this goose. He said he was going to eat it and so I was interested to see the process. He plopped it down and told me: "Jess the technique I'll teach you today can be used for any birds you'll have in the future." Prior to this goose, the only dead animals I'd cleaned were fish. It wasn't too bad I guess, I kept thinking of a delicious Christmas Goose Dickens would have enjoyed. But when it came to eat the meat, I had a weird relationship with it and could only taste it (I'll admit it was actually pretty good). My first goose gives me sympathy for my ancestors that lived without butchers where you had to slaughter and prepare animals you raised for meat...I may have been a vegetarian.

Over the break we made another movie with all the kids in Delta...Tonto's Revenge. It was a western. I filmed it and Rhett edited it. We were showing him our footage and he pointed out the gambling addictions, theft, violence, focus on obtaining "women", and smoking represented in our film and Rhett said it was definitely not a G rating...but hey it's a western. What did he expect?

These were my favorite two scenes. This little nephew pretty much improvs all his lines and we don't know what he'll say. Tonto digs on tribal lands with his loyal squaw Bonto watching. They dug up a baby-- RJ. (the kids made the plot for this one)

My only regret with our film is we didn't integrate one of my favorite Jack Handey's in somehow...

"If I lived back in the wild west days, instead of carrying a six-gun in my holster, I'd carry a soldering iron. That way, if some smart-aleck cowboy said something like "Hey, look. He's carrying a soldering iron!" and started laughing, and everybody else started laughing, I could just say, "That's right, it's a soldering iron. The soldering iron of justice." Then everybody would get real quiet and ashamed, because they had made fun of the soldering iron of justice, and I could probably hit them up for a free drink."

Now we are living in Delta while Rhett finishes his rural family medicine rotation and I am working rocks for the family business. I have learned much about sedimentary minerals...like did you know fluorite is used in steel production and comes in a variety of colors from purple to green?