Having a full to overflowing house gets a bit chaotic but we certainly have fun and when they all return home we miss the laughter that fills our home during their visits.
This year was a bit special because the Mason Family was preparing to move to London, England and that means the Grand Darlings will be an entire very large Atlantic ocean away. Thay have in fact made that move this past week and the grand darlings have already started at their new school in London. You can probably tell from the look on Maggie's face that she is not altogether thrilled with the hat part of her new school uniform, Katherine however is "rockin it".
It's a bit painful to me and Julie to know that we can't just get in the car and drive to Atlanta to see them. But life offers opportunity just so many times so they are off to a new life adventure and as much as we do not enjoy them being so far away we know that their life will be enriched by the experience. In this case you just have to let go.
To get a small glimpse of what Christmas is like in Georgia check out the video below. We do things a bit differently here for the holidays and sometimes we're even lucky enough to have weather that allows us to do these things outdoors. You'll want to change the quality setting to 720p for the best viewing experience.
Even though I received a flu shot in early fall I was besot by that unwelcome illness just as everyone was returning home. This kept me out of the shop for several days but this past week I've managed to complete a Brute shooting plane I had in process and make considerable progress on several other tools on my bench.
The web page is back up after being down for close to 3 days. We were obviously not the only ones affected by the domain verification requirements. When I tried to contact my web host to resolved the issue I was required to stay on "Ignore" or as some folks refer to it as "Hold" for quite a while in order to speak to a human being. Once contact was made the problem was solved rather quickly. As my friend Jon Fiant was would say, that's "one less thing". His favorite line from the movie "Forrest Gump".
We have made some changes to the way we conduct business at Brese Plane. We have changed pay systems. Because our transactions are much simpler and fewer than many businesses we decided we no longer really needed a shopping cart per se. Most of our transactions were usually for only one item at at time and for the few times we need a multiple item transaction we can certainly make other arrangements.
We have also lowered the deposit amount required to place an order. Most planes now only require a deposit of $200.00 in order to secure a place in the cue. The only exception to this is the 125-38SBP (Brute) plane. It requires a deposit amount of $600.00 because we tend to turn those around in less time because that product is usually purchased along with a related product from Vogt Toolworks.
I hope everyone enjoyed their family and friends during the holiday season as much as we did. We wish everyone a happy and prosperous New Year.
We have not participated in a major woodworking event in several years now. The next big event for us is Handworks coming up in May. If you look at the list of vendors and demonstrators schedule to be there, it's shaping up to be quite the event. Hope to see you there.
Ron
