2017

Best wishes to you and yours this holiday season! 2017 has been a pretty good year and we hope that this finds you in good spirits.

We finally pulled the trigger on building a basement bathroom this year so that Anna won’t have to trek upstairs as much when she’s working (rumor has it that Greg will be locking a certain potter in her studio and sliding sandwiches under the door). In addition to the awesome bathroom, we also gained a closet for our garb and a finished area under the stairs for storage.

Not only did we add another bathroom in the house, we added one outside too – in the form of a 25’ Sunray Smokey travel trailer! We’ve thought about getting an RV for years, so when we came across a great deal, we couldn’t resist. Of course, we also had to acquire a vehicle that could tow Smokey, so we traded Anna’s SUV in for a 2011 Toyota Tundra. While we haven’t yet gone camping for ‘real’, we were able to use the trailer during the MD ren faire, which was lots of fun and a huge time saver.

Over the summer we took a wonderful road trip to Wisconsin to visit family. While we didn’t take the newly-acquired travel trailer, we did get to stay in the Mayhew’s amazing new loft apartment while we were there. We may have ‘exported’ a lot of cheese (and some beer) from our travels in the cheese state.

Anna’s pottery business continued to grow in 2017 with increased sales and a very successful studio open house. This year she made a lot of dinnerware for folks, and it’s always a thrill to see it being used in photos on Facebook.

The big change for Gregory was returning to commuting to work full time with a new gig in northern Virginia. Much of his free time was spent supporting the pottery business as Anna’s ‘roadie’ and booth steward, making sawdust and sampling beers.

Brodie and Duchess are doing well. Monty, the Eastern box turtle that we adopted last year found a more permanent home with a school teacher.