Tuesday, December 23, 2025
There is always the thought that once I photograph a spot X number of times that I will have reached the end of what I can do with it. That is always the thought, and it is one of those thoughts that I have had several times with the subject of today’s trek. You see, shortly after moving out to Wilkes County, I found this barn off of one of the main routes through the county. In fact, it is about a mile up the road from where Toni and I stopped for gas in the Spring of 2020 when we were thinking about moving out here. That was when we gave up looking at land for the day and pulled out a few saved properties in Zillow which ultimately led us to our home. Anyway, I’ve talked about that plenty of times and the point that I am trying to make here is this barn would count as low hanging fruit in many respects. It is right off of the main road, easy to spot, and kind of isolated. It is one of those locations that I saw early on and stopped to photograph fairly soon after moving into town. Of course, it was not without its problems as far as some distractions that were close by to the right, and for the fact that I had to shoot over a fence while avoiding a power pole and some support wires.
Over the years, I did get better at photographing this barn and I watched the trees and brush grow up around it which changed the landscape quite a bit. There was also a Dollar General built in the background which was less than ideal as there was already a school to contend with a bit further into the background. I rolled with the punches and would stop out here at least once a year to get some fresh photographs. Sometimes I would shoot panoramas, but the trees in the field along with the brush seemed to restrict how wide my pano could go while keeping a nice visual flow to the scene. Most of the time, I would shoot a single frame photo that showed the barn in a pretty typical location within the frame. There just wasn’t much else that I could do with it because of the environmental restrictions for the area.
Most recently, I had been out here and found that the barn was basically overrun with vines making it even more difficult to photograph, but I still managed to make it happen. There was a large part of me that felt that this was going to be the last time that I was going to be able to photograph this barn because it was just going to be covered up the next time that I was in the mood for it. That was in the Summer of 2024, and I really didn’t pay that much attention to it over the following months, though I would ride by and just enjoy looking at it. It was sometime around the Spring of this year that I noticed a lot of changes to the property. The brush and a lot of the trees were getting cleared out. I was actually thinking that the property had been sold, and they were going to level it all. Undoubtedly, to make room for another Dollar General since the closest one was about a block away.
My assumptions proved to be wrong, and I was actually surprised at what came next. The farm was back in business and there was corn being grown in the field. This was actually exciting as I had heard many years ago that this property, and the house next to it were kind of in a state of legal limbo with the family. I didn’t know this for sure, but it seemed that it might be the case now. I knew that for the first time in a long time, the barn was standing proud once again without the vines covering it. The brush that had restricted my options for compositions had been largely removed. It was not without its negatives though as the buildings in the background were now more visible without the brush to cover them. My gut told me that this wasn’t going to make it any easier to photograph and probably would make it a little too complicated of a scene to really be able to capture the way that I would want to.
By the time I decided that I wanted to try it again, the corn was much too tall for me to get a clear view of the barn. Now, I did stop by here on a couple of occasions with the camera to see if I could get an angle that would work with it. Nothing ever did work out because the only angle that I could get a view of the barn from was directly to the side of the barn which just didn’t show the barn off like it deserved. I kept looking and waiting to see what would happen. At some point during the Fall, the corn stalks were all dried up and the field was starting to get cleared, though it was taking place over quite a long period of time. By the time that the last of the corn was gone, I was well into working my portrait sessions through the Fall. This left no time to really look at locations like this to photograph, and as you have seen, my frequency of going out on treks dropped to next to none for those months. I had photographed this barn plenty of times, and with pretty much the one composition, I wasn’t really looking to do it again unless something really called out for me to do so.
It has been a little hard to get back on the horse, so to speak, when it comes to going out on treks. I had spent so much time doing people photography that my mind had actually shifted gears noticeably, leaving my creative thoughts leaning in that direction rather than with the landscape and decay subjects. I was trying to get back in the swing of going out, but it was a long and hard road in many respects. Having a bunch of things to catch up with here at home also played a part in keeping me away from going on my treks. I think it was in November that I kind of started to get that urge to go out again for rural subjects. That was fun but didn’t quite ignite the creativity that I had wanted it to. In fact, it wasn’t until my most recent trek that I found that spark once again and started to feel somewhat capable when it comes to photographing decay subjects.
Coming off of several days of shooting, editing, and blogging put me back in the mindset of creating the photographs that you have come to expect from me. That got me looking at the weather and trying to decide when to go out again and what I might want to shoot when that time came. The first good weather day was looking to be Tuesday, although looking back on things, Monday was pretty darn good. I made the mistake of listening to the weather forecast for Monday which had mostly sunny skies and cold. I figured that would be a good day to stay at home and work on the two different blog entries that always wrap up the year. By the time I came upstairs and saw that it was wonderfully cloudy, the day was nearly over with only a couple of hours of daylight left. The forecast was still looking good for Tuesday though, with low level clouds in the morning and then clearing off in the early afternoon.
I had two thoughts of places to go with the first being a spot on the way to Lenoir that I have been trying to get permission to work for a couple of months now. I’m still not exactly sure of what I have been seeing from the road, but I think there is some potential behind that house. I’ve just had a very hard time locating anyone to ask about entering the property. The other location was that barn that I’ve been talking about. For some reason, it had popped into my head maybe a week or so ago and I had driving by it to see what it looked like. All the corn was gone, and the composition had opened up remarkably to the front of the barn. There was still all of the clutter to the right that I would have to deal with, and with the trees losing their leaves, there wasn’t much that I could hide the building behind. It was still looking like something that I could possibly try, and I figured that my same basic composition would probably work just as well. It wasn’t like I had to drive a long way to get there, or hike any distance to get into position. There was no risk at all, just all potential for reward.
When the morning came, I got up a little earlier than I really wanted to so that I could see what the sky was doing and decide which location I wanted to shoot. Well, when I got up, shortly after sunrise, it looked like it was going to rain at any minute, and the light wasn’t all that flattering outside. Looking at the weather, it was looking like this was going to be it for a while until the clouds started to break up. I might have been able to get some good light for the spot going out to Lenoir, but I didn’t feel like trying to track down a property owner this close to the holidays. I just wanted to show up and be able to take a few photos without bothering anyone. That left the barn as my next best option, but the conditions were way too flat for that to work. I was going to need some light for a bit of visual interest, or at least some contrast in the clouds.
I went down to the studio and did my morning marketing and finance stuff before coming upstairs around 10am. This was when I had planned on heading out to the barn because the sun would be up high enough to shine some light on the barn, and the clouds should be clearing off a bit after that. Looking outside, the clouds were still pretty thick, but there was a bit better quality of light hitting the landscape which I could tell looking into the back yard. It wasn’t perfect, but there was a chance that I could get something worthwhile from the barn. I just needed to be there to see what the light was doing to make the final decision. I went ahead and got some shoes on and loaded the camera up in the truck. I was going to know something in about 15 minutes.
When I got there, the light was flat on the barn, nothing much had changed with the location either. I did confirm that the fence was down on the Southern end of the property, but I didn’t feel right going through the new opening when the part around the barn was still fenced. The brush on the fence wasn’t as bad as it had been in the past which made me a bit more confident that I could shoot from the fence rather that up on the embankment to the road. I’ve done both, but it is much easier to avoid the power pole and support lines if I can get in close to the fence and shoot above it. I went ahead and parked the truck on the shoulder before getting the tripod out.
I actually did this backwards from what you really should do. With the tripod in hand, but not the camera, I went down the hill and found the spot that I wanted to work from. I was familiar enough with this location that I knew that the trick was going to be finding the right spot to shoot from and then I could determine the compositional possibilities from there. That would tell me what lens to use, and what filters were needed. I just had to find the place to put the tripod first.
It didn’t take much to find the right spot and I dropped the tripod and leveled it knowing that I was going to try for a panorama. Looking at the field from where I was at, doing a panorama seemed like the logical choice. I would be able to include some of the secondary buildings to the right in the shot which would give the barn enough breathing room to stretch the composition out to the left quite a bit. This scope would allow more of the sky to be included and as I thought about that aspect, I felt that the telephoto lens which is my normal choice for panos would not be the right lens for the job. I was going to actually need a wider-angle approach to the scene in the way of my standard zoom. Since the sky was so much a feature, I was pretty sure that I was going to need some kind of grad filter, and would have to see if the polarizer would make enough of a difference to matter.
With the tripod left in the spot I had picked, I went back to the truck to get the camera. I knew pretty much what I was going to want, but I also knew that I might want to get some closer crops which would be a different lens. I also needed to get an exposure reading before I could choose the grad filter I was going to need. The smart thing to do was to just bring the entire bag which is what I ended up doing. It wasn’t like I was a long distance from the truck, but I wanted to be able to make changes quickly as needed. I found a spot to place the bag and started to build the camera up the way that I figured it would need to be done. I then started to take a few test shots to check exposure and depth of field before committing to the panorama series of exposures. Once I had all of that worked out, it was time to start the string of images that would become stitched panoramas.
Each of the series of photos would be from five to nine images from left to right. Since I was working with a wider-angle than usual, I wanted to give more overlap than I usually do in order to help the stitching process with the perspective distortion that is introduced by the lens. The telephoto is much easier to manage a panorama, but I wanted more of the sky involved than what that lens would be capable of doing. I shot about three strings of images before I started to feel that it was looking right from a compositional standpoint. Then I started to wonder how much the perspective was going to cause me to have to crop into the scene once the image was stitched together. To give myself room for that to happen, I opened up the lens up from 41mm to 35mm for that bit of built in margin of error. I then proceeded to shoot several more groups of images as the sky changed up with the bright part looming over the left side of the scene balancing nicely with the barn in the right side.
I was liking how things were looking with more sky involved, so I decided to recompose with a wider focal length for another round of photos. I ended up shooting an additional four strings of images before I laned on the string that gave us our second keeper of the day. This one was done in black and white because of how dramatic the sky was. Since it wasn’t just a single bright spot over the left side, I wanted to really emphasize the overall contrast in the sky and the best way to do that is to pull all of the color out of the scene and work it as a black and white image. This gave me so much control over the different tonality contrasts both with the sky and with the landscape. I loved how it turned out and found that it was just as powerful as the earlier color image.
When it was all said and done, I had used up 77 exposures for a total of eight panoramas which I was going to have to wait until I got home to determine if I liked any of them. It is very hard to previsualize a panoramic image when you can only see it developing one frame at a time in the camera. I was pretty sure that I was going to like the panoramas and wanted to make sure it wasn’t like the last time I had shot one which turned into an image that was not all that different from a standard 3:2 aspect ratio, only it was a string of vertical images stitched together. This time, I wanted to make sure that I had a full-on panoramic photograph because I had time to capture some regularly proportioned images after I got that done.
That was what I settled in on doing and started to compose some images that were just single frames. This was actually pretty easy because this is what I have done here for years. Some of the times I have been down at the fence with the standard zoom while other times, I have been up at the shoulder of the road with the telephoto lens. Regardless, the basic composition is pretty much the same. Because of that, I wasn’t all that excited about what I was capturing, but I stuck with it because the sky was looking really good.
As I was working though, I noticed that a Jeep was slowing down and pulling off on the side of the road. This didn’t bother me at all because I was on the good side of the fence, and I knew the family that owned the barn. Well….at least in passing. The Jeep slowed to a stop where I was standing, so I went up the embankment to meet with the driver. I didn’t recognize him, but we started to talk about the property owner. I remembered the last name of the family and mentioned that. I ended up introducing myself and he immediately knew who I was by name and said that he follows my work. He even mentioned that I had just finished a four-part blog entry. Yep, he really did know what I was up to. It turned out that it was his son that I usually talk with about several different barns in the area that I have shot. I never really want to bother him by asking permission to get in closer since I never really know when I am going to be out at the barns. Now I was talking to his dad, and he was telling me that I was welcome to access the property and even go into the barn. All I was really interested in working with was the exterior of the barn and possibly the house next door, but I really appreciated the offer. He even told me about the two barn owls that lived inside the barn, and I really hoped that I would get a chance to see them at some point. This was getting exciting!
He was really nice about the whole thing and even cut the conversation short so that he didn’t interrupt the good light. Now that I had his blessing, I walked around to the opening in the fence and started walking through the field. He had said that I didn’t need to drive through it because it was still very wet and muddy. I had no intention of driving in the field, but I had no idea how accurate he was. In no time at all, my shoes were caked with mud, and I could see tires getting very slick out here. Fortunately, I had no problems walking and worked around the area with brand new eyes. all of a sudden, I had so many new angles to work. If he hadn’t come by when he did, I probably would have been packing up the camera and heading home to process just a handful of photos. Now, things were very different and this barn, which I’ve photographed for five years, was now something brand new to explore.
I started out with a shot that captured the entire property, but that just seemed too static and expected. Hey, I was allowed to waste a few frames as I figured out what worked and what didn’t. This was the first time that I have been able to access this property, and I wanted to give it all a try before I called it day. I really wanted to get to the other side of the barn to see an angle that I had never even considered before. With the road a bit elevated, I was pretty sure that I would be able to avoid it in the photos. I also had a side benefit from this angle as the sun was lighting up the face of the barn while the side closest to me was in the shadows. This gave a nice dimension to the photo, and it was something that I really wanted to capture.
I found the spot that made the most sense and set the camera up. There was no need for the grad filter at this point so that came off. I also pulled off the telephoto lens that I had put on right before the very beneficial intermission and swapped it back out with my standard zoom. I found the composition that worked and shot a few frames as the sun went in and out of the clouds. Unlike when I had been shooting the panoramas, the lighting was changing constantly now. It wasn’t the normal bright or dark change up either; it was an infinite level of gradations of light that were happening. I ended up shooting a bunch of photos from dark to light and back to dark again trying to get the right mixture of light on the right areas of the frame. It increased my shutter count, but it was very much worth it and part of working in changing light like this.
When I was happy with the variation on lighting with that composition I stood back and looked to see if there was anything that I could do to improve on the composition. At first glance, I didn’t really see anything, but as I looked deeper, I found that that perspective was a bit…expected. I wanted to get in closer and make the barn look imposing, and for me to do that, I just needed to take a few steps closer in. When I looked at the composition in the live view, I loved the perspective of the barn and just how close I was finally able to get to it. It seemed to be a bit complicated in color though, so I decided to switch the camera over to black and white to see how that would look. Once I changed that view, I was sold and knew that this was how this photo needed to be captured.
Once again, I was waiting on the sun to do what it was doing. I needed to get the front of the barn lit up like it was doing when I was setting up the composition. It was now in the shade of the clouds, and it was a pretty big cloud at that. It was going to be another minute or two before that cloud moved out of the way and the sun would hit the barn again. I was happy to wait because I had seen what it looked like with the light on it, and I desperately wanted that again. My patience paid off, and I could sense the light increasing again. As I had done before, I fired off several frames as the light increased and then as the light dropped back down. Very rarely is the peak of the light what I want, and it is usually something about 2/3 of the way to that point that turns out being the best light. I just can’t trust that I’ll nail it with a single exposure so that is why I will do a series of shots as the light is changing. This is the best way to make sure I get what I want, and I was able to do just that.
I also wanted to spend some time with the familiar side of the barn now that I could get up closer to it. I had thought that getting in closer would help me get rid of all the distractions behind it, but that wasn’t the case. In actuality, it seemed that the distractions had gotten worse by getting closer to the barn. I remembered a composition that I had started working on when I was on the other side of the fence. I had used my telephoto lens to get a close crop to the front of the barn so that I could concentrate on the face and the sky. It had been rather run-of-the-mill with the telephoto lens, and I didn’t really like it. Now that I was closer, I had another opportunity to try it again with a bit more perspective involved thanks to using the standard zoom. This seemed to work out much better as the barn had much more presence at this distance with a wider focal length.
The thing that I had to concentrate on now was where to crop into the barn to make it make sense and look appropriate. I really wanted to just include three of the windows on the side of the barn going with the rule of odds, but I saw that by doing that, I was missing the tree coming up behind the roof which I thought helped to frame and balance the image. I tried to include a fifth window, but that brought too much of the roof in, and I could see the end of it which would mean I needed to include the whole barn at that point. The only way to get the crop the way I felt was best, I was going to have to include four of the windows which I felt was a good compromise.
With the composition figured out, I again started to play the wait on the sun game. From the looks of the sky, you would think that the sun was pretty stable, but there was a good deal of clouds moving over the sun to my left. It was still a mix of thick and thin clouds which gave me lots of variety on the quality of light that I was seeing on the barn. This was great as it gave me options on how the photo was going to look. It did mean that I had to wait here for a bit longer than usual as I waited for the light to change a couple of different times.
In the end, I think that this one was worth it, and it turned out very nice thanks to the sunlight. I still think that I made the right decision on where to crop into the barn because it looks natural this way and I have no way of knowing how much further the barn went, but my mind can complete the shape, so the photo still makes plenty of visual sense. This is a way of composing images that I still have to actively think about because it isn’t as straightforward as composing around a complete subject, or even an isolation. This is a type of composition that is kind of in the middle of those two types of photos, and it brings in a different set of considerations. When it works out, it does work well though.
I had now worked the barn from pretty much every angle that the light was hitting, and I was pretty confident that I had plenty of photos to work with. One thing that I hadn’t really had time to consider though is that I had photographed this barn in some very different conditions. Yeah, I knew that I started off with the barn under lots of great clouds, and I was aware that the sky was now clearing off, but hadn’t really stopped to think that the conditions that I had seen over the course of less than an hour was yielding images that looked like they were photographed on two different days. I mean how fortunate can a photographer get? Different angles, different conditions, and completely different moods through the entire session. It was almost like I was getting in several different treks in a single stop.
Now, it wasn’t all fun and games though. I actually found a really nice composition on the other side of the barn with a nice tree, but the barn was in total shadow at this point. The clouds above were getting hit with the sun and the exposure latitude over the scene was just too much for the camera to work with. In order to get enough detail in the barn to make it a worthwhile shot, I would have had to leave all realm of realistic lighting behind with a heavily worked HDR image. I tried it just to see what I could do, but I didn’t like how the end result looked at all, and it was just a matter of it being the wrong light. I had tried to wait for the sun to get covered, but even when that happened, the clouds were still the same brightness and everything across the landscape just got darker. It wasn’t meant to be, but I do have an idea for the next time I’m out here at least.
That failure did lead me to my next composition which happened to be the tree that was going to be in the last composition. It was a pretty simple tree, but I liked the shape of it and the fact that it was isolated in the field. The side lighting from the sun was looking lovely on it. Yep, this was the same lighting that made the barn look horrible in the last attempt. It all comes down to angles and positioning. The tree was looking great with the side light and the clouds at the horizon allowed the top of the frame to look really good in smooth blue for a bit of depth to the scene.
There wasn’t much at all to this shot and only required flipping the camera vertically and waiting for the sun to do its thing providing the depth to the tree. I doubt I waited more than three minutes for this to happen and I was happy with the outcome. Looking back at the barn, I was pretty sure that I was all done with it for the day. I still had the house next to it which I had shot a number of times in the past as well. I had much better luck in the early mornings when the sun was much lower and I knew that the bright sunlight wasn’t going to do any favors for this scene. That didn’t stop me from walking over to the house though. If nothing else, it would give me a chance to clean off my shoes with all of the mud that was caked on them.
I tried a couple of different shots of the house on the side that was getting some light, but nothing was really looking all that promising. It all looked forced, and I didn’t want to have photos that looked that way. I knew that the light was still good in certain directions, and I would eventually find something in that direction to put in front of the camera. It wasn’t until I got to the other side of the house that I spotted what was going to be my next subject. As with the tree behind the barn, there was another tree that was picking up some very nice side light from the sun. This one was also isolated in the field, and I noticed that the shadow from the house was between the tree and my camera. This was going to make for a great vignette and something that was certainly worth photographing.
I worked out where I needed to place the camera and got the tree trunk positioned just to the right of the midpoint which supported the natural direction of the tree. The yellowing of the grass snaked through the frame in a tight “S” which added all kinds of visual interest to the landscape with that dark vignetting at the foreground. It was one of those photos that already looked like it had been through processing when I looked at it in the image review. For the colors and contrast to be that vivid with the way that I have the camera set up was something rather impressive. As I figured would happen, there wasn’t much to the processing of the photo with just a few small tweaks needing to be made.
One of those tweaks that I needed to do was one of the newer tools in Lightroom which I have only used a couple of times before. I knew that I was going to use this one when I shot the photo because of how the sky was showing the polarization. If you didn’t know, the sky is not really a uniform blue all around. There are darker bands both North and South as you get further away from the route of the sun. Using a polarizer in these situations with a wider focal length will make this banding visible and I usually try to avoid using a polarizer with anything wider than 35mm when the sky is overall clear and blue. The new tool is buried in with the point color tab in the HSL panel and is called variance. This is a tool that is based on a color picker, in this case a blue in the middle of the range of blues in the sky. Once selected, you can then reduce the tonal contrast within that color to address the unevenness that the polarizer causes.
Why not just leave the polarizer off? Well, the polarizer does a lot of other things for the scene that I wanted to keep in place. Most significantly are the extra saturation levels of the grass and the contrast throughout the scene. These things would have to be dealt with using different techniques in post which are actually quite a bit more involved than just evening out the blue in the sky. I’ve been known to manually even out the tones in the sky when using a polarizer, but this new tool does it quite a bit more effectively and efficiently. That was all that I needed to do to this photo in order to make it look the way I imaged it to look.
Now that I was done with the trees, I once again turned my attention to the house. I had pretty much decided that I wasn’t going to do anything with the house as a whole because the sunlight was on the wrong side of it, and it was really no longer all that flattering. I was looking for details to photograph and possibly some abstract compositions to shoot. I actually wasn’t having much luck with that either, and found myself looking at the vines on the siding of the house. I shot a few different compositions of the vines but really didn’t see anything all that interesting about them. It wasn’t so much the house or the vines, it was how I was choosing to photograph them. I needed something a little less expected and something that had a bit more visual interest.
I started to look for some different views of the vines and found that they continued all the way up to the roof. There was a window above the porch extension that had vines going through it. This was interesting and I liked the idea of the different angle by including the lower roof section. There was also a tree just beyond the house which looked to have some of the same patterns that the vines did. In a way, the tree was a continuation of the vines which pulled that element out of the house and placed them in the sky.
Now I was getting somewhere with the vines. I started to form a composition looking at the lines and shapes within the frame. It was all coming together, but the color was certainly distracting. Because of the way the sky was illuminated and the fact that this side of the house was in shadows, I was pretty much forced to make the sky white. I hate a white sky in a color photo, but the easy solution here was to just go with black and white. I switched the camera over to black and white and it started to look much better just from that change. I increased the exposure and essentially let the sky go white as well as the shadowed siding of the house. This left the vines and the roof details to be the only dark portions of the frame. It was a high contrast, high key image that really suited the scene.
I shot a couple of variations of this before deciding that I had that one in the bag. It was an experiment, but it was based on several shots that I had done before with some old buildings. I wasn’t sure how this was going to turn out, but I was kind of excited to see the final version. It did not disappoint, and the more I look at this one, the better I liked how it turned out.
That was pretty much the last photo that I shot of the location. The light was getting much too harsh with the sun now at the highest point in the sky with no clouds to diffuse it. I took one more look around to see if there was anything else that I might want to shoot. Without finding anything, I walked back to the truck which was parked not too far from where I thought was going to be the only place that I was going to be able to shoot the property from. It was that one stroke of fate that set me up to go into the property and get all kinds of new views on the old barn. What was supposed to be a pretty quick visit had turned into something quite a bit more involved.
I ended up shooting 146 frames with nearly 80 of those being the panorama groupings of photos. Out of all of those photos I ended up with these nine keepers which is actually rather impressive for a barn that I’ve shot so many times before. Even considering the house, I rarely come away from here with more than three or four photos. This has become my all-time favorite visit to this barn, and it couldn’t have happened on a better day. I had the permission to access the property and the weather conditions turned out to be rather favorable for a lot of different compositions. There were only a few photos that I had to pass up thanks to the lighting, but I got more than I missed which is a great trade for sure.
I hope that you have enjoyed this trek, as well as the photos that I came back with. As always, I want to remind you that these photos are all available as prints through either the gallery store, or through a conversation with me to determine what special-order print matches your needs the best. I am always happy to work with you to make a print that fits your aesthetic and your needs. There is no better way to enjoy my work than in print form because it takes out all the variables like what your screen looks like, and how the colors are rendered. It is impossible to make sure that these photos appear the same way across many different devices, and the only thing I can guarantee is when I make a print which is how all of my image files are geared. Posting online degrades the colors, and the compression kills the detail, both of which are not issues with a print. If you want to support my art and my business, let’s get that print order started.
Also, keep your eyes out for my yearly list of the 12 most significant images which will be published this coming weekend. I’ve been working on this list for a while and think that I have finally come up with a pretty accurate list and count-down. I’ve also got my year-end wrap-up scheduled for New Year’s Day as the first Behind the Camera of the year. It will be a long one, but it will be worth reading to see what all has happened and what changes might be coming in the new year.
If I don’t get a chance to talk with you beforehand, Merry Christmas to you all, and I hope you have a wonderful New Year! Thank you all for being with me through 2025, and I hope that 2026 is an even better year…for all of us.
Until next time…
