Dear Kids,
          Our lighted Christmas tree is shining away in the corner by the front door, where the fake green pine trees usually sit. Yep, it’s artificial! $35 from Walmart. You can’t beat that. It’s white, with white lights. I’ll be bringing ornaments from our house to decorate it, and hopefully I’ll soon be putting presents under it. We won’t have a Christmas tree at our house in West Valley at all, since we’ll be here at the cabin here the whole time. And an artificial tree is so easy! You just pull it out of the box and put it up. While Dad was assembling it, I was talking to Sharon on the phone, and they were putting up their first real Christmas tree ever. How things change!
          Yesterday Dad and I helped move Tom and Kim to their new house. They had quite a crew assembled there! Of course the elders were moving fast, hauling out the big things. John was among them. Donna was cleaning, and I helped for a while, and tended Anna for a while. Grandma and Grandpa Bentley were tending Tom’s littler kids. That’s the best job for us decrepit grandparents! Moving the actual stuff went really fast, but of course the putting away is the biggest job. Over at the new house, Bentley showed me his bedroom, with lots of room for all his stuff. The girls’ room is right next to it. It’s a wonderful house. I wish Dad and I could find something like that in Kamas Valley to buy. We’ve been talking to "Fieldstone Homes," a mass-market builder that puts up cracker-box houses in places like Lehi. But there’s a development by Hilltop Road where they have built a couple of houses, and maybe they can build a house for us there, too. I don’t know. It’s hard to get any straight information out of them.
          The big action here at the cabin is an ongoing fight between Oreo and Tomcat, the wild orange fellow that has hung around here for years. Things were fine when we had the old feeder, and he could sneak in and help himself to a meal any time, with no loss of food for Oreo. But now the food is carefully metered from the new machine, and there isn’t enough for two. On Friday I noticed that the feeder had been pulled away from the wall, as far as the cord would allow, and there was orange cat hair all over it. So I made a stand of 2x6's and 2x4's that’s really heavy. I screwed the feeder to the stand, and we’ll see now if it will go anywhere. (On the "Super-Feeder" website they show all kinds of ingenious things people have done.) Sometimes Tomcat hangs out in the kitty house all night, so he can have first dibbs at the food when it rolls out. Oreo hides under the sleds and hisses at him. Yesterday morning they had a big fight under the cabin, and it sounded like they were both killing each other. Lots of thumping and screeching. We’ll see how things finally work out .
          Lots of excitement! Lots of fun! Lots of love, Mom