Seasons greetings 2020

2020 has been a busy time for the Elmore family in spite of having to stay at home alone to be safe.  We planned for a new patio and wood-fired oven a year ago, started construction in August, and are just finishing up now.  We learned with YouTube and books and kept fit by laying pavers, mixing concrete (84 80-lb bags!), laying cinderblock and brick, and setting firebricks with refractory mortar.  Our only outside help was with the granite countertops. We plan to cook everything from steaks, turkeys, casseroles, and pizza in the oven and use it as a smoker for salmon and ribs.  See many construction photos on this blog.

We have planned and took delivery of a new Sportsmobile, Savanna, to replace our 8-year-old RV, Vanessa.  Savanna is four-wheel drive and the RV is powered by 600 amp-hours of lithium batteries.  We can spend a week in the wilderness before the need to dump and get supplies.  The layout is similar to Vanessa which many of you have seen.   We will spend the rest of the winter putting on the finishing touches and then take our first wilderness trip to eastern Oregon.

Another project keeping us busy is making lamps and lamp shades.  Photos on shades include the coronavirus, NASA images, a quilt, and grandchildren; bases are made from polymer clay, ceramics, and black walnut.  The lamps have been selling well at Janet’s Co-op Artists’ Own. We posted links and photos.

David produced a show at Artists’ Own with many prints of the tree photos he took during our trip to the Canadian Maritimes last year. We logged the whole trip and posted the show.

We digitized over 20,000 slide images of David’s and our parents, then selected the best, dated, and entered titles for 3500 of them. Your photo may be there!  Click on “Family”.

Fortunately, all four of our children have remained employed and stayed healthy working from home.   Andrew lives and works in Annapolis for the University of Maryland, Steven is in Madison WI managing drinking water quality with the DNR, Emily is also in Madison teaching 2nd grade, and Amanda has a job as an assistant project manager with a pharmaceutical company, Lonza, in Bend, OR.  All four grandkids are remotely learning from home.

We look forward to hearing from you and perhaps in 2021 we can start traveling and visiting again.  For now, we go to grocery stores, homeowners’ stores, and doctors’ offices, but little else.  Take care of yourselves.  Stay healthy.

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