Holiday Update

Happy New Year!  Welcome to a long catch-up post.

Even though I am a person who doesn't do new year's resolutions, I've decided that in 2015 I will:
1.) Buckle down and build the violin I have on commission.
2.) Edit my second novel, which I think about every day and didn't touch all last year.

At least the blocks are glued to the form.

The problem is finding time to do these things.  My assistant moved to Chicago so I'm swamped with all the repairs at the store myself, exercise takes time, rehearsals take time, my husband and kids need me.... But a violin maker and writer who can't make time for violin making or writing probably shouldn't get to claim to be either thing, so somehow I will find time.  Otherwise I'm not sure who I am.

In the meantime, I want to jot down something about our holiday break before I forget everything.  (I'm always sure I'll remember, but in the car the other day we were discussing what we did last New Year's Eve and no one was certain because it all starts to blur together.  We weren't sure if it was the year of Mona and Aden trying to stay up to midnight alone, or the epic dance party.  Going back on my blog and reading this reminded me that, oh yeah, lots of people, it was totally the dance party.  Having a blog is handy.)

The past few weeks have been so busy!  And it turns out my greatest gift was that we weren't hosting Christmas this time.  One of my brothers really wanted to go to Detroit, so that became the plan.  At first I was disappointed because I like having everyone here.  (That started because I kept having babies so close to the holidays that I couldn't travel, and the drawing power of babies brought everyone to us.)  But my Ohio relatives who usually visit were just here in the fall, and most of the rest of the family were here for Thanksgiving, so it's not like they didn't get time with us in Milwaukee.

Do you know what not hosting means?  No cleaning.  I looked around the clutter in the house each night after work and thought, "Eh."  It was a great relief.  And instead of that "make things presentable by pushing everything into closets and boxes" kind of cleaning that usually has to happen when we host and have no time to be thoughtful about where things go, we did a deep clean of Quinn's room, which was really satisfying.