Merry Christmas...a bit late
We hope you had a wonderful Christmas with your family and friends. We are back from visiting family out of town and it is good to be home. We had a great time visiting with everyone and had really good weather too. Maggie did come down with a stomach bug at the end but it did not put a damper on our week. We received many beautiful gifts and are truly appreciate them all. Tim's sister, Ellen, gave us our FAVORITE gift this year. She painted the view from our backyard in England. It is just lovely and captures the scene perfectly. The view was what we all liked the most of the house, especially Tim. The photo does not give it justice but you can get the gereral idea.
Around lunchtime we received a floral delivery...very unexpected too! It was from our friends back in England ~ it was appropriate they came in a Spode vase.
This is the entertainment wall piece, from Pottery B@rn, that I would also like him to make ~ with some modifications. He isn't too thrilled about the possibility of making these things but it would be cheaper so I am sure he will come around to the idea.
The basement is divided into two sections and we are redoing only one part. The other half is the work area/furnace/scrap/storage everything else room. On Saturday, Tim and I began the process...yep I used power tools. I must say they miter saw is a cool thing to work with. 
We have about 80% of the walls framed and it is neat to see progress. We were not originally going to drywall the ceiling but do another dropped ceiling but have changed to going ahead and drywalling it {YEAH...that is what I wanted} The goal is to have the room drywalled and all lighting done by the end of the year ~ then the painting and flooring done in early January.
On the way home we stopped at the Jelly Belly factory and hoped to take the tour...WRONG! The line was huge and we were not prepared to wait so we just went into the retail store instead and did a bit of shopping. We also went to a cheese place on Friday and bought some yummy cheeses too.
Prior to leaving the coach had some words of encouragement to say to everyone then announced the reason for the PIMPED bus. They had arranged for the mini busses to take the team but the athletic director said they needed to all travel in 1 bus so this is what he arranged...the coach has named it the Aerosmith tour bus as one of the coaches is name Steven Tyler :-}
I did not want a traditional china hutch and the server I found just works perfectly. It has enough space to hold all of my stuff and I even have an empty drawer still. You can't really see much of it but it gives you a general idea.
Andrew had a meet today at Culver Academy so we made the 2.5 hour drive up to see him run. The campus was beautiful...it looked like a college campus. This was the largest meet they have participated in so far this year ~ there were 69 teams participating with 29 of them in their group. He ran in the freshman/sophomore 5K race and finished 79th out of 289 with a time of 18.31. The competing teams today were a much higher caliber than they have faced all season.. as a team, the 7 boys from his school, placed 9th out of 29 so not too bad.
In the move back our family room furniture was damaged and as a result we get to have it recovered. I found this print fabric and really like it - I want to use it on the ottoman and the throw pillows. SO this means that I need to find the right solid color to go on the sofa and loveseat....here is what I am looking at....tell me what you think? ALL input is greatly appreciated - who knows I may completely change my mind :-)
The solid fabric is an awesome microfiber and boy is it soft. The colors are not showing as a true representation of how they look but you can get a general idea.
