Ciao from MN

Good evening from a snowy Sunday night in MN. We have had a nice relaxing day after working ourselves to death Friday and Saturday. We have most of the critical boxes un-packed but still have a ways to go to get settled in. We spent about 1-1/2 hours Friday morning just hauling cardboard boxes and packing paper to a recycle cage that is set up not too far from the house. It is good to get all that stuff out of the house and has made things seem less cluttered. The gnomes are all still in their boxes -- I hope they have enough air in there and that they won't be purple when we take them out. Okay get ready to do your best Tool Man Tim grunt as you scan down to the next picture. Mom found this baby on close out sale at Lowes. We haven't put it to a true test as of yet, but it did really well on what has fallen so far and it looks like it will get a bit of a work out tomorrow morning. This weekend we got an inch or two of light powder, which I shoveled by hand. I wouldn't want to do that to much with any considerable amount of snow

I think in general the move has taken more out of us than we would have imagined. We just seem to be go go go working to get things organized and we are really tired. Saturday night after supper we said we weren't going to unpack any more and just sit down and watch TV. So we found DiVinci Code on a station and started to watch it. Within 15 minutes we were both sound asleep on the couch. Mom woke up at 9:30 and went to bed and I finally came to about 11:30 enough to find my way to the bed. I think the worst is behind us, so hopefully we will be able to rest up a bit.

Besides us physically, no matter how careful the movers are it also takes a toll on your stuff. Here is a picture of my poor clock pendulum. It really got skrunched. So far that is the major loss, but just little things show up with signs of wear and tear. I will get a new pendulum ordered and the movers will reimburse us for it. I guess all in all things haven't been too bad

You can see we got thing prioritized properly by getting Mom's sewing room all set up. She has already been to a place quilting the Happy Quilt. It is really cool and she has done a beautiful job. Just a couple more hours on the machine and it will be done. Stay tuned for the photos to come.

Her is my poor shop -- just boxes piled everywhere. I will have to figure out some heat for the garage to make progress out there. Even though the garage temperature is 10 to 15 degrees warmer than outside and there is no wind, it has still been pretty cold to be working out there. Little by little we will get it done. I probably sound whiney in all of the above, but we truly feel very blessed in our circumstances here. We are enjoying our new surroundings and adventures. Hope you can all make it up here for the reunion or any other time and enjoy our new homestead with us. Have a wonderful week