"This winter I had a lot of free time so I worked on my family tree. I have this data base that I organize all the information on. I made summaries about my relatives that I put in the family tree. I did a lot of fiddling with my computer because I had a lot of free time.

Also, during the start of my vacation I was busy making shaker boxes. They are wooden boxes made out of thin slabs of wood that are formed into oblong shapes by boiling them and wrapping the wood around a pattern. Then you pin the wood together with copper tacks. You make lids for them the same way.

After Christmas I went to Anchorage to get a checkup. While I was over there I did some shopping for a bigger hard drive so that I could do editing on videos that I download onto my computer.

My daughter, Lorah, came to visit for Christmas and New Year's. We didn't get a chance to see any of my other relatives because we stayed here in Marshall for most of our vacation.

While in Anchorage I started thinking about how I could make a porch for my house in South Dakota. A friend of mine there showed me how he was making his new garage. He had this little cardboard model of his house and he added a garage onto his model. The model garage is how he said his real one would look when it is finished. So when I returned to Marshall I built a model of my house out of cardboard. Then I added a porch to it and asked my wife how it looked. She didn't like the first one, but no problem, I just cut it off with a little razor and made another one. After I was done with the model, Janice made the finishing touches. We also built some other things onto the model. The model is what our retirement house will look like."