Dear Kids,
      “. . . Outside the snow is falling . . .” Boy, is it ever falling! This is the blizzard we’ve been waiting for. I hope it drops a ton of snow in the mountains.
      Right now it’s a cozy Saturday morning, and Dad is replacing the sink in the downstairs bathroom–you know how corroded and scary-looking it’s been. Oreo is curled up in the basket chair. We still can’t figure out why he gets to come in–he just does. Paul is still asleep. He came home from Logan yesterday, and he’ll be home for a couple of days before he starts working at Deer Valley. I’m wandering from one task to another. I’ve been taking heavy drugs because I had a crown prep last Monday morning, and I think Dr. Condie drilled right into the nerve. He has supplied me with plenty of lortab, however, and I also have some tylenol with codeine that we brought home from Canada last spring. You take a couple of those and a couple of aspirins at the same time, and they work sort of like the old percodan that you can’t get any more. The lortab works great, too. I hope I’ll start feeling OK pretty soon. It’s not Dr. Condie’s fault, because I waited way too long between dental checkups, and I had some decay underneath an old crown. Bad combination.
      Donna was here on Monday and Tuesday taking her licensing test again. I sure hope she passed, but she won’t know for 8-12 weeks. What a racket! If you flunk, you have to pay a lot of money to even look at the test you took, and many more hundreds of dollars to take it all over again. So obviously they make it as hard as possible, and hardly anybody passes. But Donna has a great attitude. She’s willing to do whatever it takes. While she was here, she cooked up some pheasant that her boss, Dave, had shot. She fried it up like chicken nuggets, and Dad said it was really good. I was too sick to taste it. Oreo ate the leftovers, and everybody was happy.
      Donna’s back working at Deer Valley again for the winter. She and Bevan don’t have dental insurance, but she wanted me to ask Dr. Condie if he would trade four all-day passes for two checkups and cleanings. So I asked him, and he said, “I think I could go for that!” He skis with his three kids, and they’ve never been to Deer Valley before. He was pretty excited. I’ve never heard of anybody trading ski passes for dental work, but he thought it was a great idea.
      Gotta go. I love you all. Mom