Yes, more primer but also greetings!

North Carolina weather has not cooperated with working the in garage, so I have set about some short moments priming and sanding the car’s body shell. There is not much new to report, though I will post some photographs after the Christmas Holiday week. I’m taking most of the week off, and perhaps warmer temperatures will be a nice Christmas gift to us this year. One thing that is needing some handling is a high spot on the right door. I’ll document the handling of that little detail, since there is a little difference in body correction at this stage in the game, that is, during the final points of priming and preparation for “spraying color.”

Holiday Greetings from the Cat Cage Garage! The picture perhaps offers little to the diehard restorer — it is, after all more about my wife and me than the old car behind us. She is beautiful, don’t you think? (I will let the indirection of that sentence remain, for the reader to resolve.) Thanks to John and Susan and Alec Boutin for giving us the picture that they took during a Thanksgiving visit!

I hope you will overlook the mess in the garage. I do have to contend with other objects in this little domain, and many of them get carted outside when it’s time to work on the car. In parts of rural North Carolina, people’s wealth has been counted by the number of outbuildings scattered on their property. This is probably a hold-over from the time when tobacco farmers cured their own leaf in small wooden curing barns. I am thinking that having another outbuilding wouldn’t be such a bad idea, since the garage is given over to my project and the accumulation of implements, tools, and children’s debris. The old chicken coop houses much that is not exactly poultry now. So, a small place out back somewhere for non-Jag equipment? Maybe in 2004….

Even though we can’t rev up the Jaguar yet, it has been one of a great many blessings given to us over the past year. We here in North Carolina wish everyone who visits this little space on the ‘net all the greatest and most wonderful of holidays and a fine start into a New Year 2004.

More on car restoration next weekend — this weekend we wish all of you and all of us restoration of other kinds.