Merry Christmas

Unfortunately, the photo has absolutely nothing to do with Christmas whatsoever but I can't think of a better time to post it. This is my family in August of 1995, in Livingston, Montana. They were all there to help Nancy and I construct our cabin. We're standing just inside of what would become the front door. You can see a couple courses of logs have been put in place and the window and door bucks (frames) stand upright and braced to the plywood floor.

In the front row are my sister Leslie (holding Rose), Nancy and then Andrew, my nephew. The next row is comprised of brother-in-law Darrell (holding Willie), niece Anna, niece Ellen and nephew Noah. In the next row are my brother-in-law Tony and my sister Amy. The last row is niece Sarah, her friend Chris, niece Kate and my sister Peggy. I'm sitting off on the right side with our faithful hound dog O'Malley between my feet.

That summer, we formed work parties to haul rocks, peel logs, pound nails, drill holes and generally have an all-around good time building a cabin. As I recall, almost all of them returned the next summer to frame walls, paint kitchen cabinets and window and door trim, pick up wood scraps, hang doors, clean windows and perform other thankless tasks. I hope they all had a good time.

This photo is one of the survivors. It, along with a bunch of other possessions, spent 2004 in a storage unit in Livingston while we were moving from one house to another. Over the summer, there was a huge rainstorm and water flooded under the storage unit door. One box of photos was sitting on the ground and soaked up a fair amount of water. Many prints and a few boxes of slides were damaged beyond repair. As luck would have it, thousands of unremarkable photos of unimportant events survived unscathed. But hundreds of pictures of the cabin building process and the slide show of our 1987 bike tour of Europe were lost. Bad luck.

So count your blessings and Merry Christmas everyone.