Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 2007 Our big events this year were all home-related – a new roof, a propane tank and backup generator, and a new water line. We have many power failures, mostly courtesy of the combination of windstorms and living in a forest. One time last year the power lines were down four places within 10 miles of our house, all between us and the power substation. No power has meant no water, since the well pump is electric. Now we have automatic power backup and a public water system months away, so we will be in good shape to deal with emergencies.

Here is our house with the new roof, plus the new windows that were installed in October on the wing on the left. As you can see we now have raised the whole roof about 3 feet – at least on the front! There is still some old, lower roof on the other side of the house to be raised when we get to Phase III. This photo was taken from our new driveway, another of this year’s projects.

This picture shows Neil building the wall between the master bedroom wing and the living room. The old roof in the foreground is over the living room. Neil did a lot of creative temporary structure to get us watertight – hopefully it will last a few years until we get to the next phase! It will be a year or so before we complete the interior of the master bedroom wing. Then I can move out of the guest bedroom and we will be able to have houseguests more easily.

One of our many pretty sunrises looking east toward Whidbey Island. Below is one of this year’s fawns – the deer love the dandelions in our lawn!

We took a short vacation in August along the North Cascades highway, visiting Leavenworth, Wenatchee, Winthrop, and Mt. Baker.

My quilt guild, Cabin Fever Quilters, has an annual quilt show. This year we had a quilt challenge – the “challenge” being to design an original quilt using a particular fabric and a fall theme. Visitors to the show voted on their favorite. My quilt for this challenge is shown below. I won the challenge! The challenge fabric is the leaf print in the bottom border. I used my photocopier to reduce the scale and print new fabric to use in the forest floor in this scene. Yes, we quilters can make our own fabric. I also painted the sky fabric in the background and made the tree leaves with thread.

Our quilt show was the same weekend as the Port Townsend Film Festival this year, and Elliott Gould was the guest celebrity. Judy Harder, shown above with Elliott, met him at an event and invited him to our quilt show. He came and helped Judy draw tickets for door prizes. He was very gracious and impressed us all with his enthusiasm for our little show (well, he is an actor).

Some other visitors this year were a trio of raccoons. They spent one afternoon climbing trees and generally being noisy. Another visitor was a coyote I discovered sleeping on our lawn one morning. Unfortunately he was far enough away that I was only able to get a video, not a still photo.

	The beach and lighthouse at Marrowstone Point on the north end of our island, with Mt. Baker in the background. This is part of Fort Flagler State Park, which occupies the whole north end of the island. As you can see, the beach is more rocks than sand, but kids have fun with it.
	We get lots of tugboats pulling barges with all kind of cargo past our house, but imagine our surprise one morning when the cargo was a whole house!

The Nordland General Store and Post Office decked out for Christmas.

It is a Nordland Christmas tradition for Santa Claus to arrive by boat. This year he arrived at the Nordland General Store dock on Mystery Bay December 2 in the middle of a rare snowstorm. (Photo courtesy of Joyce Bush, an island resident) Happy Holidays and best wishes for a wonderful 2008 - Neil Schulte and Shirley Sandoz