Overwhelmed by our Winter Wonderland

It's a good overwhelm...I am awe when I look out at the beauty of winter this year. We have over a foot of snow. Some trees have layers of snow on them giving them a grandeur of white, but after the snow came cold and hoar (?) frost and I love it. The skies have had the alpine glow of pinks with clear blue skies around the cloud. Some times a fog adding to the perfection. Such beauty that I can't believe I'm experiencing it first hand not just looking at a picture. Jenna captured it when she did Jessa and Levi's engagement pictures. She hasn't gotten any of the hoar frost or the awesome skies. I don't ever have my camera with me.

This morning I went in to work late so that I could drive out to Girdwood with Jessa to look at the Girdwood Chapel. They want to get married in Girdwood as this has been one of Jessa's favorite places and Levi proposed to her there. The Lady of the Snow church would be nice but it's $1600 for the chapel for 4 hours on the wedding day and hour the night before rehearsal, AND the reception hall. Though it's nice and the nature surrounding it is awesome, $1600 is ridiculous to pay. So any way she called on this little chapel that would only be $150. 50 would be a crowd for it but they said it would work and that we could do the reception there too. Yeah, funny. It looked like a visitor's center from the outside. It was one room with 6 pews and then chairs. 50 would definitely be the limit. And to do the reception we could set the pews off along the walls and move the chairs out of the way to set up tables. The BEST part (I'm being sarcastic here) is there is no indoor plumbing. All they have is a porta-potty. Yeah, I don't think so. The scenery is awesome but that's it. So after having driven in the dark on the uncertain winter roads, we head back disappointed but under a gorgeous pink and blue sky surrounds by white covered mountains, and iced waters. It was an awesome drive back.

I get into work and my office doesn't have any windows but as I walk around to other parts of the building I don't know how many times I stop and just stand at the windows, commenting on the beauty to whoever will listen. It has been an absolute awesome winter wonderland. Hey Levi, all this beauty ALMOST makes me want to insist you have a winter wedding (not that it would work, and don't get any ideas, I did say almost).

ADN.com has a map where we can find Christmas lights to look at, so seeing as we don't have the Christmas parades that Sister Tammi gets to enjoy, or the acres of lights that Sister Becki Horne has seen, maybe we can take a drive to look at lights. Sister Grant's brother drives limos taking people around to look at the lights. That's something I would love to do.

Maybe I'll take my camera to work tomorrow to see if I can catch some of the beauty I see from our windows. With my luck tomorrow it will be a dreary day.

By the way for those of you who wonder how many hours of daylight we are getting, tomorrow were expected to get 5 hours and 28 minutes...yeah. At least they've been beautiful.