Best wishes to you and yours this holiday season! 2018 has been a good year and we hope that this finds you in good spirits.

On the home front, we decided to finish more of the basement, providing us with a nice space for guests to sleep, displaying Anna’s work during pottery studio open houses, and housing our exercise equipment. Greg has a few projects to complete to truly finish out the space, but we’re pretty happy with the results so far.

There was more time spent in ‘Smokey’, our travel trailer, this year, as we took it to additional craft shows and festivals. It was very nice to come home to our own space and bed, plus it makes the nine week run of the Maryland Renaissance Festival so much easier. We learned quite a bit about trailer camping, including that we want a bigger trailer! Hopefully 2019 will find us in a new (to us) fifth wheel, and a few more opportunities to camp for fun.

Anna’s pottery business did well in 2018, in spite of quite a bit of bad weather in the spring that cancelled some shows and impacted attendance. Her pottery is now featured in a home décor store in Culpeper as well as a couple local galleries. The major new product this year was sheep mugs, which have pretty much flown off the shelves.

Greg partially tore the tendon that connects the biceps to his right forearm, requiring surgery in June to repair the tear. He has recovered a good portion of his strength thus far. He is looking forward to getting back into the workshop to make things.

Brodie and Duchess are doing well. We discovered that Duchess has a thyroid deficiency after her energy levels dropped off, but the medicine she is on has her back to her usual nudge-y self.