Happy New Year

before ,after stripped,ready to begin and almost complete...to the right.

The picture below is of the Mersey Mill on

New Years Day morning.The other picture is of me taking down the old living room tile ceiling to reveil this lovely wood ceiling same as in my Gallery.

What an incredible holiday Season weather wise. You could say we got away with wonderful weather while other's all around us did not. In my last post right before Christmas I was sharing with you about our little incident ,fender bender and was teasing about someone out there to call and buy my Santa's..Thank you Bill and Patricia,Artist friends of mine http://www.theartistsloft.com/ who did just that called and bought the Santa with the Little blond girl on his lap..that girl looks like Patricia, Thanks guy's . Now with all this nasty weather all around us I was not able to get their package in the mail for fear that it would be sitting around some airport waiting for people to be shipped out on a flight first as they were, so I will get Santa off and posted soon. New Years Day was wonderful, I got on my bike first thing in the morning and took a ride as well I did Jan.2nd. the weather couldn't have been better. It was amazing. I took my camera this time on my ride ,i was disappointed of all days with the camera and there were no waves or swirls but looking out across the Harbor seeing all the smoke rising from the paper mill which employed so many years past ,fed so many families all these years , not only the Mill town but the Fishery as well and back in the day flooded my head with memories from back years ago growing up here,you could say our streets were lined with gold so to speak back then. The overflow from the Mill and the Fishery made life very rich in this small town. Today not so the case anymore ,we pray that the Mill continues and strives , I hate to think what could and would happen if it closed it's doors forever. When I was a youngster here in Liverpool, the job market like in so many little towns through out Canada were rich with success thanks to Mills and ship yards . Shops could afford to be open, some of us didn't travel so much outside our little towns ,we could pretty well get anything we wanted here. Back in the early 70's I worked at the Horseshoe Tavern one of four bars here in town. Pretty well every night but especially Wed. Thurs. Fri. and Sat. nights the walls of this place rocked , draft beer was 99 cents a glass,T bone steaks were big ,juicy and delicious,seats were full with regulars and I have a lot of fun stories from back then. My older brother is the star in maybe many of these stories but one particular time ,well I won't tell that story yet, something about a deep freeze and dirty dishes when I opened up for my shift one morning, he was best bud's with the owner. I also remember when in 1974 things started to die down for a bit and some of us had to do double duty such as wait on tables and do the cooking,not like the really great days when there were sometimes two cooks on per shift,one waitress and a couple bar tenders. In late 1974 I moved to Lunenburg and while there I got a job in the local Tavern, "The Dolphin Tavern" where they had just opened the downstairs to woman,Ladies were still not allowed upstairs, and my goodness I have even more stories from there. Of course Lunenburg even back then was a Tourist town but the local fishermen and fishing industry gave that town life.Every Spring we would see cars loaded with belongings ,arriving fresh from Newfoundland to go fishing out of Lunenburg Port , some of the finest people I have ever met, stepped out from these cars and are still friend's today.

OK, I have been so busy and away from the computer for days now, take a look ,can you see the difference in these two shots of our living room? I sure can and it smells wonderful, I still have much to do, and moulding and trim needs painted but I will get to that another time after I finish my commissions, I am not one to procrastinate . We were lucky ,not to have the puppy while doing this job, she would have ended up with paint on her for sure, I was moving fast to get it done.

So this evening we will relax, look at our nice fresh sunny room and deal with the mess on the dining room table, find a home for all the stuff tomorrow. I will be selling my round oak dining room table with two leaves .Anyone interested ?let me . I want to make something like ,what I call a Shaker type table, something I can double duty as a work table, we seldom sit at the table when only the two of us dine so I have to think purpose and space, like I have said before a small house needs to have a lot of double duty going on.But I believe my plan and choice of color has worked for our darling little living room space, a change of table in the dining room and I am set to go and do my Winter work,except for the gym, I will buckle down and get back at it.