here I am, late to the party and probably dressed inappropriately

Already the 4^th and no end-of-the-year/new-year post but I have been having fun with my three grandgirls cooking and snuggling on the couch watching movies and working on the jigsaw puzzle and going to all the little shops on the Square and our favorite re-sale shop in Glen Flora and sleeping late. Needless to say, I have not made even a tiny bit of progress on the work I feel behind on.

They were fetched home yesterday evening.

So...2014. It was a year of momentous changes starting out with a heavy load of commission work which we didn't complete til June and during that time we were agonizing over whether to sell the old homestead or not but even if we did not sell, things would change drastically anyway since our daughter and son-in-law who lived next door were definitely selling. Then, last April, the opportunity we thought we had lost to buy the old auto body shop across the street, came around again and we bit the bullet and bought it. Now there was no doubt about selling the city property but it was not easy. Oh, it was easy enough to find a buyer who gave us a premium price but extricating ourselves from a place we had occupied for nearly 40 years was hard on everyone. The Boy and Wife had to find a new place to live and it took them two moves to get settled. The Girl and her family didn't find a rental until the very last second and the uprooting and re-settling was emotional. And as for me, I had to turn a hard heart to my house because I knew deep down that once I left it it would be torn down, which it was, and now for the first time in my life, I had no base of operations in the city. But summer was full of the visits from the grandkids and moving and too damn hot to do anything in the new shop which was just a jumble since, during the nearly two months it took us to move completely out of the house and move the shop, we just put stuff in there helter skelter. Fall came and with it cooler temperatures and we got in there and sort of arranged it and got to work on the two small commissions we had and the small castings for the annual open house in which we participate and also starting on the small bowls for the gallery show in March. And I finished the last 7 models for the Botanicas. Fall has usually brought a new round of commission work but not so far which was a little bit of wish fulfillment as I want time to focus on the cast glass work, something I haven't had much of for the last two years.

Whew!

So, New Year's Eve the rest of the grandgirls' family came out and we had a fireworks extravaganza. No photos of the aerials as I could watch them or try to successfully photograph them.

The bone piles.