Empty House...

Hallo everybody!

It's been a while since we last visited and lots has happened. The house seems very quiet now after Hannalize's parents were here for a visit. They were here with us for just over 3 weeks and a busy 3 weeks it was. We showed them around St Maries and North Idaho, before we took a trip down to Oregon. We visited with Joel's parents at the cabin and made a trip to the Cowboy Dinner Tree for their world famous giant steaks. We were thankful that we went to the cabin, because unfortunately the cabin burned down the next weekend. Thankfully, no one was there and no one got hurt.

With the labour that was flown in from South Africa, we were able to get a number of projects done around the house. Several more rooms have been painted, new shelves have been put up and large amounts of leaves were raked.

Here in Idaho, hunting is in full swing. Both Joel and Hannalize's dad shot Whitetail Deer and Joel has shot many Grouse. After hanging for a few days, the deer were cut up and lots of biltong has been made and is hanging in the garage. the rest of the meat is in the freezer, either in the form of mince meat ("hamburger") or boerewors (sausages). The venison makes wonderful biltong and wors and we have been indulging in it. For the Americans reading this, biltong is a South African type of dried meat, similar to jerky, but also different....very, very good..!!!

As can be seen in the above photo, Hannalize's dad and Roxy both enjoyed watching the History Channel very, very much while they were here visiting. We're not sure if Roxy was as interested in the program content as much as she was interested in the cheez-its that were located next to the couch.

On Oct 30th, we woke up to a white St Maries. The first snowfall of the season, while light, was quite beautiful. We had a week of very cold weather, as cold as -13C/9F. Is has warmed up and has started raining, but more snow is expected by the end of the week. We have been burning a lot of firewood... Joel got his new weather station installed today and we can now measure temp, wind speed, rainfall, and barometric pressure from the warmth of our dining room.

Hannalize will be traveling back to Oregon next week for work. Joel has been busy with ambulance training and his math class that he must do to get his Idaho Engineering license. Not too much other news, but keep checking back and we will have some pictures of the first big snowfall soon...

Joel and Hannalize