Happy New Year?

 We missed most of it, this year. We were away for 4 whole days at Christmas, visiting with my sister-in-law in Nova Scotia. Driving up was good for the first 6 hours, but then we hit drizzly rain, poor visibility, and then darkness hit. The last leg of the journey (2 hours) was mine, but with cataracts in both eyes and the car lights in the dense drizzle, it was a white-knuckle journey.

On the way, we made a stop in Kentville, NS and visited Freedom Miniatures there. To say I was blown away by what Shelley carries, is an understatement. It is well worth a visit if you are ever in Nova Scotia, as she has just about anything a miniaturist might want. Santa arrived! 

We picked up a number of components required for the book bindery so it appears that the project will become a reality. We just have to recover from Covid first....

On Tuesday, we headed home via the ferry across the Bay of Fundy, which halves the trip in terms of time for us. I had had a bit of a sore throat the last couple of mornings, but didn't think too much of it as the house we were staying in was dry enough my sister-in-law keeps misters going in the living room and main bedroom. But, the Carpenter-in-Chief had the entire drive from the ferry terminal to our house, as I was totally out of it. Two days in bed with headaches, fever, congestion, aching bones and so on, and then I realized I had lost my sense of taste and smell -- a test proved I had Covid. Which means we are both under voluntary house arrest until our tests come up virus-free, which cannot happen soon enough for me. The C-in-C also caught it, although a milder case, but we are still not rested enough to do very much beyond reading and sleeping. However, my sense of taste and smell has returned, thank goodness! A life without stinky cheeses and dark coffee would have been a bleak thing, indeed!

Now that we have the doors and windows, we can cut the carcase components; we are using commercial ones rather than attempting to make our own from scratch. That means cutting out the front and back, as well as the false wall, and using the commercial windows and door to mark the appropriate openings for them. The large shop window has a fancy header, which will have to be replaced as the shop is in a humble fisherman's cottage, and dentil moulding just would not have been on the builders' horizon. We'll see how that goes.

I do hope 2023 will be a good, productive, happy year for all of us!