Snow in Las Vegas

December 18th, 2008. Mt. Charleston from the golf course behind our house. There is usually snow on the top of the mountain, but not in the foothills as you see here.



View of the Sheep Mountains from our club house, with the golf course in the foreground.


These are the Sheep Mountains, north of our house. They very rarely get snow on them, but on December 17, 2008, this was not the case.

Early Christmas in Minnesota

So we got together at Sue & Bob's on Saturday AM for Brunch, and took this family photo, this maybe the one we sent out in our Christmas cards



Sunday Morning, we get up and open presents, just like Christmas Day, only a couple of weeks early. And of course of all the neat presents Alice Mae received, she had the most fun playing in the empty cardboard boxes.


The Lon Jerome II Family photo, Lon, Alice and Jaime


Alice all dressed up on Sunday afternoon to go see Santa Claus

A great Christmas Present

We flew from Las Vegas to Duluth, landed on time, brother Jim picked us up, we stopped for lunch and then headed to Minneapolis. We arrived at the duplex that Carrie, Lonny and Jaime bought to find Carrie the only one home from work. We spent some time with Carrie, then Jaime got home from work and went to pick up Alice. When Alice arrived home, she was very stand-offish, acting shy etc. Anyway, when Lonny got home from work, he said give me a few minutes and I will come and get you guys. He did and Alice had changed cloths, this was the T-shirt she had changed into. It reads "I'm going to be a big sister." What great news! Come to find out, Alice had been coached not to tell us the secret so that is why she was acting shy, shs didn't want to spill the beans. We are very happy for Jaime, Lonny and Alice and of course Auntie Carrie too. The big event is scheduled for early July, so guess where Grandma & Grandpa will be in July.

No Prizes

Well, the purple car made it into the semi-finals but the yellow one did not.

The purple car was beat out in the semi-finals, so no trophy's or ribbons.

But we feel good about it, since these cars were built in one afternoon, but now we know.

MJ went down yesterday to see the show cars and she says some of them were beautiful. I guess it's a guy thing, on somethings, we just never grow up. Some of these guys had to have spent hours working on those cars.

DARN!

Well, one of the cars made it to the semi-finals, the other didn't. But that was it, no big winners except the fact MJ's Boss's had a great time and got to team build with the Engineering staff at the casino. So, it was a win for them and for us, since we did these cars in one Sunday afternoon.

Wait until next year, we are going to kick-butt, because we will spend the 6 weeks building the cars and not waiting for someone else to do them for us.

We had fun.

First Heat Winners

NEWS FLASH!

We still have it!

They didn't race the cars last week because of the short week and too many other things going on, so the first heats were yesterday, Monday, Dec. 1 and guess what?

Both of the cars won thier first heats. The finals are today and/or tomorrow. We are both excited and hope they do well in the finals.

MJ's bosses can't believe they have competative cars to race against the Engineering Department.

We will let you know how we do in the finals.

A different kind of Sunday

About 6 weeks ago, MJ found out that the Engineering group at work had a team building experience last year where each engineer built a Boy Scout Pinewood Derby car and raced them against each other. This year they invited MJ's bosses to participate. The bosses explained their dilemma to MJ who being the good soldier that she is, volunteered to get their cars built for them.

First we asked my staff to build them and they thought it was a wonderful idea, about 3 weeks past and they (my staff) said NO, we don't have time.

So then we asked a neighbor down the street if he would do it, and he agreed but said he was really busy, but would try to fit them in. Last night we called him and he said they were ready but not really racable as he didn't have much time to work on them.

We were disgusted with ourselves for not getting involved right away and found a hobby shop online last night. We went there right after church today. As luck would have it, hobby shops now sell complete kits, ready to assemble with the proper weight, racing wheels and complete instructions. All you have to do is assemble, paint and put on decals.

So guess what we did this Sunday afternoon, you got it, we built 2 Pinewood Derby cars for MJ's bosses for racing tomorrow (Monday). Now do you know where Carrie gets her procrastinating?



Painting, reading instructions, sanding, painting, putting on decals, what an afternoon.

Very hard at work, painting and sanding the cars.

This is a side by side comparison of the ones we ordered and what the finished product looked like, we were very pleased with our handy work on such short notice.

Mary Jo did a wonderful job with the painting and decals, I think they look really good.


This is how they looked when finished, we were very happy with the end result, now it would really be neat if they won a prize.