WOW

This week has been wonderfully hectic watching the store transform into our vision. Our new friends worked side-by-side with our old friends late into the nights as we watched our Minnesota/Wisconsin world meld with our Marble Falls/Burnet world. We received beautiful plants, flowers, cards and phone calls from friends and family who couldn't be here.

We missed sharing this excitement "live" with you and we love the fact that you track it through this blog. We felt the absence of our (combined) five children scattered between Minnesota, Iowa and New Mexico. Patina is also our "baby" and we can't wait to share it with each of them. So much of our dream in relocating here and building a business in the Hill Country involved the vision of reconnecting with what is REALLY important in life - with Kaitlin, Sean, Taylor, Monica and Chandler on the top of that list. As parents, we love the fact that they are all happy and living their own busy lives, but we miss them terribly on a day-to-day basis. An empty nest is a mixed blessing in so many ways!

Our Grand Opening party was fabulous. The live music was great, the catering was exquisite and the feedback we received was very affirming. The store is absolutely gorgeous. We still have construction work to be done on the water monument sign (hopefully this week), a few construction punchlist items to clean up and some merchandising tweaks left to be done. We will spend today cleaning and tweaking before we start the cash register tomorrow at 10:00 am.

We absolutely mean it when we say "Come visit anytime - we'd love to see you!"

Marnie and John