Winter lull

Between work, school, and ice storms, it has been a pretty quite month, all things considered...So this will be a short blog posting.  Picture above and below are some images I took at a recent 4-H awards banquet Hope hosted for her kids, their families, and other volunteers.  Hope and her colleagues with Desha County Cooperative Extensive spent quite a bit of time arranging the festivities; below, Hope reads a statement regarding a recent grant awarded to her group:

Pictured below are Hope and many of her 4-H kids with the large novelty check for this award from a major agribusiness:

The kids have been busy with a variety of school activities (when they haven't been sick).  The blue blur in the middle of the picture below is Beth cutting a rug a the recent Daddy-Daughter Dance her school put on:

I have had the opportunity to do a little volunteering for archeology so far this winter...I helped on a project of one person recently; we are searching certain fields not too far east of Monticello for signs of prehistoric occupation...I guess the large dart points I found this day were good evidence of that!  The point pictured below was the best of the five I found that day:

We also attended a "Pan African Day" at a local church hosted by the University of Arkansas-Monticello; we helped with the Arkansas Archeological Survey's exhibits and kid activities:

 

...And that's all I have for now!  We had enough of an ice storm earlier this week that knocked out our power for about a day, and we're expecting another winter weather event tonight into tomorrow--hopefully not damagingly so, but I'm kind of expecting to have the kids home tomorrow...a snow day seems likely!