Dangie on Ice

So Meredith is home to the annual New England Pond Hockey Classic, which is this huge weekend-long tournament on the frozen bay. This year over 200 teams registered. We took Mona down on the bay and she seemed to be wondering "how long has this awesome park been here?" It was really crowded, but we went back again Sunday afternoon and I got to try out my new hockey skates. For a couple months in the winter, the bay is dotted with ice-fishing "bob" shacks. In a couple of weeks there will be the annual ice-fishing tournament on the same bay and we're told that the hundreds of bobs out there make quite an impressive sight. I'll be sure to take a picture!

The Bears and I

I know we just posted recently, but something totally awesome happened today. We had bear visitors! A momma and her two cubs were up a tree in our next-door neighbor's yard! It was so cool!

Canoe Trip

I'm not going to try to catch any one up on our life since the last post. Suffice it to say, life is good. Instead, please enjoy the following pictures:

 We spent the night at the Ackers' home. They live in our branch (1hr and 20min away!). The next morning we went canoeing on Long Pond, where Brother Acker said we were sure to see beavers.

 And we saw four! That speck between the islands is a beaver.

 It was an incredibly hazy and wet morning, but it was so beautiful. For whatever reason there is this really odd cairn thing on the water. We don't know why... or how??

 No matter how hard we tried to point them out to Mona, she insisted on looking the opposite direction any time there were beavers to be seen. The next two pictures are from previous excursions.

 These are mushrooms, not flowers.

View of Squam Lake. Nevermind the girls in the center frame, they were laying there the whole time talking on their cell phones. I had to just take the picture with them in it.

Fore-Father's Day

I thought Father's Day would be an appropriate time to honor my Father as well as his (and my) fore-fathers. I had recently learned about my New Hampshire heritage. Here's how it goes:

My dad is Von Callister (b.1947 - Delta, UT)
his dad is Joseph Lathel Callister (b.1909 - Oak City, UT)
his dad is Joseph Platte Callister (b.1879 - Oak City, UT)
his mom is Caroline Eliza Lyman (b.1851 - Salt Lake City, UT)
her dad was Amasa Mason Lyman (b.1813 - Lyman, NH)

Amasa was an early convert to the church and actually an apostle while Joseph Smith was alive. He was born in the tiny northern New Hampshire town of Lyman, named so for the Lyman settlers of the town some 30 years earlier. Amasa's father (Roswell Lyman) died when Amasa was only 5 and Amasa's grandpa on his mother's side (Perez Mason b.1747) played a big role in raising him until he too passed away when Amasa was 11 or 12. At the age of 17 Amasa heard the missionaries that were passing through Lyman and was baptized and moved to upstate New York to join the saints.

I was anxious to research and try to locate some graves of these people. I discovered that Perez Mason was actually very easy to find since he had been a veteran of the Revolutionary War and most war veteran's graves are kept on record. So we knew the cemetery he was buried in and thought we might get lucky and find that Roswell and Perez's wife are also buried there. Well, we took the drive (I think it was about 1hr 15min) to the North Monroe cemetery right on the NH/VT border where we quickly found Perez's headstone and his wife's right alongside. It was pretty cool!! Unfortunately we didn't find Roswell there, nor at the two other cemeteries we searched in the area. It's entirely possible that he is buried in Lebanon, NH where his parents and at least some of his siblings are buried. Lebanon is only about an hour away from us, and might be a fun trip some other time.

It was pretty thrilling to be standing next to my Great, Great, Great, Great, Great Grandfather's grave!
Happy Father's Day Dad, and happy Father's Day Perez :)

Our Home... and a Canoe!!

Come one, come all and take the tour of our home. This post is in response to popular demand. Enjoy the video tour. 

Another great reason for posting is to tell you all about my birthday present to myself. I have been keeping an eye on Craigslist and every yard sale I've passed since we got here, looking for a boat. You practically cannot live here and not have some sort of watercraft. I found a canoe that was nearby, in great shape, and best of all: super cheap. I picked it up yesterday and just took it out today for the first time. It was awesome :)

To the Coast!

Saturday Angie and I spent the day in Portsmouth, NH. Portsmouth is a really cool town. It was settled in 1620 and has lots of cool historic sites and stuff (which I appreciate). It's only about 60 miles from where we live, so we had to go check it out. By pure serendipitous chance, we happened to be there for their annual Market Street Day. It was crazy, they had blocked off almost all of downtown and there were hundreds of booths, good smells, live music and thousands of people. We toured the home of William Whipple (signer of the Declaration of Independence), and I had myself a good ol' New England lobster, which was spectacular, by the way. We walked all over town (which is actually pretty small) and drove to  Odiorne State Park, which is just a nice park along the sea shore. This is the coastline that the vikings saw 700 years ago and named Vinland (if you buy into that kind of stuff (...and I do)). Enjoy the pictures

First week fun

Angie and I built a box fort with all our empty boxes (we had tons). We had fun collapsing it too.

This weekend was also the international classic arcade tournament at the "world famous" Fun Spot classic arcade museum about 3 miles down the road from Meredith in Weirs Beach. They have so many arcade machines, it's really something else. Angie and I bought $5 worth of tokens and played a bunch of games. It was pretty fun. Most of those machines hold the current world record scores. The picture is of me playing on the first and only Pac-man machine that has ever been beaten (notice the plaque on top).

It was beaten by this guy: