Happy New Year!

We would love to wish everyone a fabulous 2007. Our hopes for you ALL are for prosperity, great health, loving relationships, peaceful existence, good karma, plentiful food and abundance in every aspect of your lives. Oh yeah, and blessings, lots and lots of blessings!
We have spent the past couple of days preparing for our 2007, as I'm sure many of you have. We've set "house" goals, personal goals, business goals, and on and on. Hopefully, we can manufacture the energy to make all those goals come to the reality side!! We shall see!
Today we managed to "de-Christmas" the house. The decor is now back to everyday ... although around here, that is still most interesting! We've decided to sand the floors the weekend of the 12th ... so keep good thoughts. I understand the dust will be ankle deep ... I guess we'll just pretend we're at the beach! Hopefully those big sand blowers will come by to clear out the mess ...
Paul installed a beautiful new cast iron mail box in front of the house today. He's been working on setting a concrete base for a few days ... the weather here is not really ideal for setting concrete, but after 3 days, we have an installed project! Mike (Brinkley Hardware man) is upset with Paul and says "great, now every woman in the neighborhood is going to have to have one". He might be right ... his wife saw ours and is very excited about having one for herself! Paul also became a one man demolition crew today and tore down some walls upstairs. Now we have a very nice "flow" upstairs that will allow things to be as they should be! There was apparently a "wanna be" carpenter in this house before we bought it. We are not on the same page as he was when it comes to the renovation details! He has covered up most of the original "tongue and groove" wood upstairs. The "bead board", as it's called here, is absolutely gorgeous, but someone was trying for the log cabin look and wanted to hang boards in all kind of extreme geometric lines. Not our cup of tea - we're going back to the authentic wood. And Paul is doing a GREAT job of getting us there ... besides, I think it's fun for him to tear something up every once in a while! ;-)
Paul goes back to work tomorrow and I think I'll be going as well. I've made a contact with a friend of mine who is a real estate agent and she desperately needs some admin. help. I do hope she is ready to have me join in soon ~ it'll be great to use my brain again for something other than painting and cooking! My driver's license expired Saturday, and my tag expired too ... so Wed. I'll be headed to the tag office. All I can say is, Lord, help me! Hopefully the officer in charge won't have to help me with sound effects through my test! (Whew! Whew!) As David has said, "y'all sure have a good time just doing ordinary things there" ... he's right! Never a dull moment. I'm still planning on teaching dance, but it's a couple of weeks away still.
The temperature dropped about 12 degrees inside one hour this afternoon ... and now the wind has picked up and things seem a bit chilly. But we're supposed to be back up into the mid range 50's tomorrow ... this is the craziest weather I've ever been exposed to! There were plenty of skiers in Banner Elk this past week ... and the weather was "snow making" friendly, so I'm hoping the economy was boosted. The restaurants sure were jammin' ~ I know that for a fact! So, if you're thinking of coming to visit, let us know. We'll see if we can get y'all a path that doesn't include the skiers SUVs on the 2 lane streets! SLOW!!!!
Happy New Year and many Blessings to all, Paul & Cheri