Happy Holidays

Just call us wanderers, vagabonds, nomads, homeless, with no address to use for Christmas cards.  Thanks to Becky, Scott, and Julia who let the Werners descend on them for a family Christmas.  We arrived last Saturday, Krista on Monday, and Dan on Friday.  On Christmas Eve we enjoyed going to church for the candlelight service where Becky was part of the music presentation. Christmas morning found that Santa had been very busy indeed, and Julia enjoyed  slowly opening her presents, playing with each one as she opened it.







2011 will prove to be a very eventful year for our family as we welcome our grandson in March and we plan a wedding. The night before Krista left to fly to Ohio Mike proposed, so she arrived in Ohio with a diamond on her finger but a lonely spot in her heart leaving her fiance of one day. We will be very pleased to welcome Mike officially to our family, hopefully sometime this summer.

It's beginning to look like our house in the woods

This is the latest view of our house.  It is beginning to look like the home in the woods that we have been planning all along.  Each day a little something is different, and at this point everything is noticeable.  Because we go up so often  we are getting very good at driving switchbacks.  The quickest road from our apartment to our house is called the W Road, and for good reason.  It's about a 3 mile climb up.  The road hugs the side of the mountain with some twists and turns, but it's that last 1/2 mile that  is quite interesting, particularly if you meet someone coming the other direction.  If you look at a Civil War era map you can notice that the road was a W even back then.   Once we get up on top the road flattens out because Signal Mountain is really more of a plateau than a peak.  We then have about a ten minute drive along the top, but driving up and down, no matter which road you take, is quite steep and twisty.

Last night we joined some friends at a bluegrass "concert" at the Mountain Opry.  It's on the mountain in a very old building which looks like it was a school back in the  40's.  Every Friday throughout the year, local bluegrass musicians gather just to play, and anyone can sit and watch, but this week was a little different. This was a fund raiser for scholarships to continue the Appalachian music tradition.  There were musicians of all ages there, but I was dumbfounded at the talent of some of the high school students.  There was an incredible 16 year old fiddler who played Orange Blossom Special, and  a young banjo player  starred in Salty Dog Blues (that was the song the Darlings played on Andy Griffith).   One young man was very accomplished on both the mandolin and the harmonica and another played a mountain dulcimer.  Of course, Rocky Top had some in the audience stomping in the aisles.  Banjo music does not mean Deliverance to me!

It's snowing here today, a nice soft quiet snow.  We are expecting a few inches to accumulate. SM gets about 5 inches of snow on average so this may be half of it now.   How I wish we were in our house sitting by the fire looking at the snow falling in the woods instead of in our apartment watching it fall in the parking lot. But, it's nice to know that we can enjoy it from indoors and we don't have to go out in the snow for anything other than an occasional doggy outing.

Congratulations to Elizabeth and Matt.
Best wishes to Pam and Bryan.
Welcome to the world Zoe Purkiss.