The Great Northwestern Swamp

We start off with a few faces from our annual Christmas Open House that was held yesterday. You will immediately notice that just about everyone has on a festive winter or Christmas sweater...except me. I am the one in the gray shirt with the gut hanging out! The pose is back to back with our friend Justin, who stands 6 foot 8. You can see that I am not that far behind. He may be taller than me, but I know that I outweigh him by a ton or two! Kay and I are convinced that we had more people attend this year than we ever had. I probably was due to the weather, in that the last two years our soiree was held during snowstorms. This year...just rain.

Did I say just rain? That's just about all it has done for the past 3 days. Everything is wet. There is mud everywhere, and the mold is starting to thicken. All that is finally changing. On the tail end of the rain this evening there was actually a light dusting of snow that collected on the grass. That is all done now, and it will probably all melt again tomorrow. We are going to be getting into a chillier weather pattern through Christmas, but there still doesn't appear to be any significant snow. Today the temperature made it to the low to mid 40s. Tomorrow it will be in the mid 30s, and then near 30 on Christmas Eve day. A high pressure system moving in, along with all of the soggy ground will make for a foggy weather pattern at the end of the week.

Earlier today I was out on the basketball court at Shadle Park High School to referee a freshman, or is that freshwoman, girls game followed by a girls JV game. Both contests featured University High School of Spokane Valley against Gonzaga Prep of Spokane. Prep won both. The G Prep JV coach was Beth's coach for a couple of seasons while she was playing basketball at Prep. Coach Hermann is a great guy, and he took it easy on me, not chewing my butt the whole game like some coaches like to do. In reality, my partner and I had two relatively easy games to call, and we did a darn good job...even if I do say so myself. We let the girls play, only calling the fouls that we had to, and the girls did the rest of the work, keeping the play clean.