Hello Winter and Happy Birthday, Tammy!

I've been staying busy down in our glass shop working on building an inventory of miniature stained glass panels/sun-catchers for my Etsy account. I had one sale right away last week when I went live with my virtual storefront but nothing since then. I plan to add some lesser expensive panels to my inventory to entice people to take a chance on someone like me with no track record or reviews to recommend my work.

Expand the photo to the left to see a collection of some of my pieces. A few in that mix are copies of designs done by Frank Lloyd Wright and are not for sale.

I'm enjoying losing myself in the art form again. I let Pandora supply the background music and can easily spend 6 hours or more at a stretch working on a project. It's relaxing.

I'm officially certified to flip Lefse unsupervised! Tammy gets together with her aunt Joyce each year around this time to make several dozen of the Norwegian flatbread. Joyce was here last week but Tammy needed to make even more for a luncheon and I offered to help. It goes better with two people. It was actually a lot of fun. We're planning to make them again in another couple of weeks.

Until recently I could take them or leave them but then I discovered how good they are with ham and cheese. I'm now a big fan of them.

The pups and I had a really good week of walks but I'm afraid our walking days are going to be much less now that winter seems to have arrived and settled in. I was out walking in shorts and a t-shirt doing my Orchard Lake loop yesterday afternoon just ahead of a cold front. It pushed through last night and on the backside of it we had lots of wind with rain that eventually turned to snow but not before leaving our roads with a thick coating of ice. Our temperature dropped 20º in just a few hours. I don't mind the cold and the snow; it's the ice I can do without. We had more than our fair share of it last year, so much so that I barely made it out to the trails on my fat-bike because I don't have studded tires.

Tammy and I have had a couple of full days. We finished yesterday at The Angry Inch, a brewery in Lakeville where we gathered with the faithful from 3 other local Lutheran churches to sing Christmas songs, munch on snacks and drink beer. It was a lot of fun.

Today was Tammy's 60th (can I say that?) birthday. We spent the day bumming around together. We strolled the Mall of America and made a few purchases. We were going to go out for dinner later but decided to stay put and open a special bottle of wine that I'd had hidden away—a bottle of 2013, Conundrum, a California red blend. It's so smooth and a bit more expensive than we're accustomed to. She's worth it!

Global Fat Bike Day was last Saturday. There were nearly 50 of us in the group I was riding with. I would've preferred to have had snow to ride on but I wasn't about to complain about the mild day we were blessed with.

Until next time!


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