A good Monday

I usually take Mondays off, and for the last several weeks on Monday I've taken the three older kids ice-skating.

Today we did something different. After making a promise to Meredith many months ago that we would help her set up a hot chocolate stand, and after hearing our promise repeated to us on an almost daily basis, we decided it was time to make good on our word. So, we made some hot chocolate, bought some marshmallows, put up some signs, and presto, Meredith is into the hot cocoa business. At 50 cents a cup, it wasn't a bad deal at all. We had a few customers, enough for Meredith to break even and make a small profit (she had to buy at least a portion of the supplies). The biggest problem was our location. Very few cars travel down our road, so our exposure was quite small. But, the kids enjoyed their first foray into the world of business.

This evening Maggie and I picked up a used freezer that Robyn had found on Craigslist. The man who owned it lived up the road in Houston (which reminds you nothing of the Texas version; it is rural and cold most of the year in Alaska's Houston). I overshot the house on the way there and had to turn around on a driveway down the street. The man who sold us the freezer mentioned that the owner of that house was currently racing the Iditarod.

We got the freezer home and it is sitting in the garage, waiting for us to deposit what will hopefully be a large amount of salmon. Our plan is go "dipnetting" this summer. This is an Alaska form of fishing in which you take a large net and hold it under the water of a river, and wait for the salmon to swim right into it. Depending on the limits, you can easily take home 50 - 100 tasty fish. This is our plan, anyway.