Family Update

Autumn is here and it’s starting to get colder. It’s still in the 70’s during the day, but drops down into the mid 20’s to 30’s at night. The leaves are falling. It is nothing on the scale of upstate NY but people from the Valley (Phoenix area) seem to think it is awesome.  Alex has been coming up intermittently to paint the outside of our house before is gets too cold. The front is finished and Sam is going to try to finish the rest this week and next. He is leaving on a hunting trip to the Grand Canyon on Thursday. I’m not sure exactly where he will be, I just know it is somewhere around there. After much discussion over several weeks, he bought a camper today and is busy getting it stocked and ready. Will moblog pics. It is pretty new (2004), I think 19 feet long and sleeps 5-6. It has a bathroom and shower (major necessities). It is worth about $11,000 and he paid $7700 from a private seller who lives just a few blocks away. It came with a generator and special hitch too.

The kids got their first report cards last week. Tara got straight A’s as usual. Jake got 2 A’s and 3 B’s, Erin got 4 A’s and 1 B. We are working on Jake being more responsible, respectful and truthful. Last week, he had missing homework assignments and issues with truthfulness. He was grounded and we took his cellphone away. Since we’ve done both those things before, we decided to throw in some manual labor (Sam’s idea-moving a dirt pile), and a 5 page hand-written essay on the afore-mentioned topics (My idea). Hopefully, he’ll learn his teachers’ homework is less time-consuming than what I can think up.