Well it's winter in Maine! These are pictures of this morning that Terry took up in Van Buren. The first one is of a moose and actually there was another picture of two of them but it was a little blurry. Terry came home this morning from work and told me he took some good pictures for the blog. So see Tery does help out with the blog even if he doesn't type the words. We did get 6 inches of snow yesterday evening. It was supposed to warm up today, but so far it's all still here. Well it's almost time for me to go to work and I should probably comb my hair and look a little more presentable. Love to all

This is the before

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And this other is the after.

Yesterday I looked out at our vast sea of leaves and wondered if the city came around and gathered the leaves that we rake. So I was going to call today and see what the schedule was and we would rake tomorrow. Well Terry came home and said, "Did you call them? They are at the end of the street!" So we went outside and began raking. Boy was there a lot of leaves. The before does no justice to really how many leaves there were. I was going to take a picture of the pile, but they pulled up in front of our house with this BIG vaccuum and started taking care of all the leaves. There was a couple of guys that helped Terry over by the mail box and Nephi and I had this HUGE bag from the pellets that we were loading about 7 loads of leaves in from the back yard, and that was only from 3 trees. Oh my goodness, it would have been insane if there was more trees. And as it happened when we were up on the roof shoveling snow back in February, Nicole was at work and missed the whole thing! I guess this is just me getting ready for her not being here. But we really could have used her help!

Terry just pointed out that maybe I should have written out what the MTC stands for because some of you that are reading our post may not know what it means. Missionary Training Center. Here is a link that gives some information. They explain it better than I could. http://www.mtc.byu.edu/themtc.htm Here is also a picture.

Well life is moving forward. We went Tuesday morning and got Nicole's passport going. She will meet with the Bishop this weekend to get her acceptance letter done and sent off. I look at the counter and it says 3 months and that seems like so far away, but I know that it will be here before we know it. Right now we are planning trip to Boston for the Temple probably middle of December. We are needing to work around everyone's schedules. Nephi is out of school about December 12 so that helps with flexability. I wish everyone could be involved in the whole process, but I know distance and timing plays into everything. We are not going to be able to go with Nicole to Provo. They don't let you go into the MTC anymore anyway. You leave them at the curb and say goodbye, so we figured we could do that in Bangor at the airport!

NICOLE IS GOING TO THE CANADA CALGARY MISSION! REPORTING TO THE MTC ON JANUARY 20, 2010. MORE INFO TO FOLLOW, JUST TRYING TO MAKE SURE WE GET THE INFO TO EVERYONE!