Yesterday was Sunday (12 December 2022).  Church was wonderful.  I especially appreciated being able to take the sacrament to renew my covenants and to feel clean again.  I also got to hold a great grandchild through much of the meeting.  How many great grandfathers get that privilege?  Emmy is here for a visit with her family with 5-month-old Emma.  Emma is the most good-natured baby I've ever seen.  A stranger can take her, and she won't fuss.  She sat through the entire meeting on her uncle Gideon's lap, my lap, or Marjorie's, and was perfectly happy.  She wouldn't look me in the eye, though, except when I was singing the hymns.  She thought that I was singing to her, so I had her complete attention.  She is as cute and as chubby as a baby can be.

We came home to what promised to be a dull afternoon.  I had no appointments for patriarchal blessings, which is unusual.  We ate lunch, and sat down in our chairs.  Two exciting things took place.

The first was watching the progress of the foot-thick glacier slowly sliding off the west side of our roof.  I've been keeping track of our snowfall.  To date we have received 30 ½ inches of snow which has compacted down to a one-foot depth.  In that snow is 2 ¾ inches of moisture.  The first snows fell on the 2^nd and 4^th of November.  We didn't get our first frost until right at the end of October, so all of the trees and bushes still had their leaves.  The heavy snow weighted the branches down, and the trees and bushes have remained in their bent-over positions.  Our normally 6-foot-wide and 6-foot-tall spirea bush is a 3-foot-high mound of snow.  The lilac out our back door normally sticks up three feet above the roof.  Its trunks normally rest against the eaves.  The trunks are all bent over in big arches.  The tops touch the ground.

Which brings me back to my glacier.  Normally the lilac keeps the snow from sliding off our metal roof.  The trunks aren't there to prevent that this year.  Before going to bed Saturday night I became worried about the snow coming off the roof.  It was hanging down in a curl perhaps 4 feet long.  An ice-cycle was pointing straight at our bedroom window, just 4 inches away from the glass.  I drove my scoop shovel up into the glacier, and succeeded in getting it to break away at the edge of the eaves from one end to the other.  No windows were broken, which is something that has happened in the past.

The next morning I took note that the curling glacier was hanging down a full 4 feet when we left for church.  When we returned, I measured it.  It had reached 60 inches.  We couldn't see anything out of that window.  Embedded in the snow are hundreds of brown aspen leaves that the trees are finally, reluctantly, giving up.  I've never seen snow so littered with leaves before.

I watched the glacier.  I could almost see it move.  I measured it again.  It lengthened at the rate of four inches per hour.  We watched that leaf-studded wall of snow gradually descend until it was over six feet long and was very nearly touching the mound of snow on the ground.  Suddenly there was a sound like a gunshot.  The glacier broke off at the eaves, and we could look out the window again.

That was our exciting Sunday afternoon.

Then four Bradford kids showed up with their sleds.  Adam and Steve  have been plowing our driveway, and have made a huge pile of snow out on the dam.  Joshua, Tabitha, and Spencer spent a long time sledding down the pile, while Hyrum visited with us.  We made hot chocolate for them, threw Spencer's pants in the dryer, and played games.  It was a very fun evening.  I was grateful for their visit.

It's 36 degrees outside at 4:15 this morning.  The glacier is four feet long again.  There can't be much snow left on the roof.