Raven and Sparrow

The week that was

Another Christmas is now in the rear view mirror...a real doozy to look back on this year. Last year I had the flu at Christmastime so the season kind of crumbled into a facsimile of itself. Not so this time around. We had a wonderful gathering here...the boys and their girls for Christmas Eve and morning and then six more people joined us for dinner. Since there were twelve we sang The Twelve Days of Christmas, which was a lot of fun. It was a great holiday.

In the midst of all the prep and fuss we acquired a new dog. His name is Logan. He is a one year old lab mix that our neighbors couldn't keep any more. He is young and bumptious, but sweet as pie. I'm not sure about having such a big dog...I keep thinking about how easy it was to manage our corgi Sunny...but he is as he is and I think he will become a good friend.

Tomorrow we will welcome the New Year at the beach with our oldest friends. It is always a good time. I am trying to keep my focus here in the present, but will admit that I am looking forward to re-addressing my non-holiday projects. With my son Joel's wedding in the offing I have a lot to do and a lot to look forward to. I am hoping for a joyful year for all of us. May blessings abound.

 

Keep on stitching

I've been working on a lot of stuff lately, but nothing at the moment needs to be embroidered. That has freed me to play with the stitch samples I started in the Experimental Hand Stitch class I took from Gail Harker in October. The class moved so quickly that I barely started each sample before I had to move on. In the last hours of the day when stitching is good, I have been playing with them. I haven't changed any of the layouts that I started without much thought; I've been treating them like doodles and it has been fun. I just keep adding stitches until I can't think of what else to do. The french knot sample is still not finished. I'm supposed to make these into a book with a cover and each stitch identified. I might or might not.

Birthday in the Bavarian style

My sisters and I celebrated her 83rd birthday with our mom last weekend in Leavenworth Washington. Leavenworth is a little town just over the pass on the east side of the Cascade Mountains. (I think Marti lived there for a while.) Fifty years ago it was dying as the railroad and timber industries dried up and abandoned the area. A few forward thinkers decided to take advantage of their town's gorgeous mountain setting and its position on a cross state highway to turn it into a Bavarian style village for the tourist trade. In 1967 my dad and a partner bought a lot directly on the highway across from town and planned to open a restaurant there. At the time only one building had been remodeled Bavarian style, but my dad thought the idea would take off and take us with it. We went over in February of 1968 to look for a house and plan our move. Unfortunately his partner changed his mind and the economy tanked and everything fell apart. We never moved to Leavenworth, but my dad was right, the Bavarian theme did take off.  All of the sad, down-at-heel buildings on Front Street got German face-lifts and a number of yearly festivals started to draw people in. Now hotels line the highway (including the lot we once owned) and mobs regularly descend for seasonal events. We joined the happy throng for the Christmas lighting festival this year. We left the rain clouds of the western side behind as we drove over the mountains into bright sunshine and snowy hills. The next day though it began to snow heavily. Ten inches in one day. We watched the Christmas lights through a scrim of falling snow. It was beautiful and a real change for us mossy west-siders. We had a great time together and launched Mom into her eighty-fourth year. Most of the pictures here were taken by my sister Erin with her iphone. I thought they turned out great. Its beginning to look a lot like Christmas.