Happy New Year 2025!

We arrived in Florida in the evening of Dec. 17. Since then I’ve been trying to adjust to the time, helping in the store, getting used to being around family including our grandkids, and spending some time with my mom.

We are staying at mom’s house and there have been some adjustments there.

I’ve been mostly helping at the store, and doing things to help Rachael get ready for the All Florida Shop Hop in March/April of 2025. As I write this, we are waiting for the fabric. I have a couple of quilts to make when it arrives so we can get then quilted and ready for the Shop Hop. We also took a day to drive around and checked out cars. That took a whole day (to buy the car).

Other than that, just adjusting to the heat in Florida, going to a couple of things with the family and really trying to get used to life back here in the states has taken some time. For sure having a warm Christmas like we’ve had is different.

We did get to go to something our little town of Dade City has every year and has had since I was young enough to know about it and it that’s Church Street Christmas which I always loved when I lived here. To me it represents small town America as it should be.

Here are a couple of pictures from that. I’m not sure my phone takes the best pictures at night, but I can try. Click on the arrows to move it faster.

This street has at least 3 churches on it and each one had something going on in it. The gingerbread houses were in a recreational hall of one of them. Others had special musical groups singing or playing. Many people were performing in their yards - but I didn’t take their photos or record them. Mostly I just wanted to absorb the sights and sounds and not focus on photos. We were with our grandkids (and mom and dad - our son and DIL) and so I was also focused on keeping my eyes on my twin granddaughters.