Happy New Year!

Ha!  If my goal was to update here more frequently, apparently I have failed before the new year even got underway!  Anyway, today begins a new year--2014 is rife with possibilities and I am filled with dreams and visions of how it could play out.

But first, I have a few updates.  I finally finished (mostly) the letter holders Ornery cut out for us to give as gifts.  Here are three of the four I have done... the fourth one is awaiting the arrival of its recipient for final embellishment as I didn't really like what I came up with based on her suggestions.

 This one is for my daughter-in-law.  The company where she works uses dark blue, white, gray and green. Not my first choice for colors, but I thought it turned out well.  It is winging its way to Florida now.

 This one is mine, mine, MINE!  LOVE the way it turned out.  The fish are cut out very carefully from some Scenic Route paper I have been hoarding.  In fact all the papers I used were from the same set.  I love double sided paper!

This one is the one I made for my daughter and her husband. Little googly eyed monsters with teeth and horns--just the perfect theme for the two geeks! :)

Now, onto the more mundane things of life.  I noticed this morning when I switched over the laundry that one of the fins on the agitator was broken off.  We have a FisherPaykel washing machine, and it was a matter of a moment to remove it from the machine, and Ornery took it to the Man Cave and ground off the rough edges--in fact all three fins were almost broken off, so he took care of all of them.  Now, I don't know how much good it will do to try to launder my clothes without any agitator fins, but all my clothes are dirty, today is a holiday, and the part is coming ground from California--which does not look good for arriving anytime soon.  We'll see how well it works, but even if it doesn't get them completely clean, we will have the illusion. :)

We celebrated Ornery's 55th birthday Monday!  His family joined us for Chili's Takeout, and we had a nice little visit.

My sister Mimi and her husband Chuck are due in tonight!  We will begin the construction project tomorrow, and hopefully soon have a cool garden room up and running!  It should keep the neighbor's dog barking--a state which has me rather agitated today as the poor thing must have missed his dinner until rather late because he barked NON-STOP from 7:00 until after 10:30 last night.  He may as well have been outside our bedroom window, as our room is right next to the fence to his yard.  I will be having a word with them because it is against the law to have barking dogs in our fair city. In fact, it was one of the things I liked so well about living here when we moved (there were 7 or 8 dogs in the yards adjacent to ours in the old neighborhood, all of them barkers!) but this dog is a relatively new addition.

We are going to eat our black eyed peas today--a silly but tasty tradition we will happily embrace--even though I don't believe in good or bad luck.  This past year was a very good year for us on almost all fronts.  We tried to think of any bad things that happened to our little family and couldn't come up with anything! Either we are adept at putting bad things out of our minds, we are extremely grateful, or we are eminently blessed.  I would say all three! :)

We did, however, come up with a rather extensive list of wonderful things that happened throughout the year.  Today I will be recalling them with gratitude and rejoicing in an abundant life.  May 2014 be even better than 2013!