Happy Belated New Year

We very much enjoyed our last week of ‘vacation’. M & I were both home all week, so we had lots of family time and managed to be productive as well.

New Year’s Eve day brought some excitement, as we got our new water softener installed and running. We haven’t had one before. We’re enjoying the benefits of our newly soft water, and our plumbing should hold up much better and longer now. It was our family xmas gift.

We spent this New Year’s Eve the same way I’ve spent the last 19 NYEs, at my parents’ house. We came over for dinner, and my mom made a big batch of chili. Dej and Joe came for dinner but then they left for a little more excitement and went to a friend’s party. The rest of us stayed and watched some of the Twilight Zone marathon and played games. M & I had to run home for a while in the evening to take care of our critters, but we returned and stayed to toast the new year in. We left a little after midnight and tried to get L. settled down and ready for bed.

L. got the game, Catopoly, from my parents for xmas, and she was really excited to play it with all of us. It's just like Monopoly, but with cats and with lots of interesting cat facts on the cards. Libby liked the box.

New Year’s day, we hung out at home and got some chores done until it was time to go back to my parents’ for my dad’s pizza. He will be having shoulder surgery this week, so it was the last of his homemade pizza for a while. We continued with the TZ marathon and more games.

Dej and Joe were in town, staying at our house from New Year’s Eve through Sunday night. They popped in and out through the course of their visit. Just when we were getting impressed with our daughter’s newly found maturity and responsibility and wondering who the mostly polite houseguest was who looked like our child but didn’t act like her, we were eventually assured that our daughter was indeed still around. She left us a tub full of leg whiskers and forgot to clean up the apple cider she spilled on the floor. And in case there was any doubt whatsoever, she called at 2:30 am one night, because she had forgotten her housekey and couldn’t get in. That’s the kid we are used to. She hasn’t totally gone and grown up yet. ; D

Saturday was date night. Our last one was spent wrapping gifts, and the one before that was spent in the hospital. We were ready to get out and do something. We met our friends, Lynn & Rick, at a Thai restaurant in Madison. We hadn’t been there before, but they highly recommended it, so we were looking forward to trying it. I ordered my favorite dish, and it was excellent! Perfect. We all enjoyed our meals and ate way too much. We never order dessert when we go out—too much food and too much money, not to mention the lack of good vegan desserts. We had to, though, because they had mango sticky rice. I love this stuff! It’s hard to find, and I’ve never tried to make it on my own. It was good. It was very good. I love that restaurant! We went their house after dinner and visited and hung out for a while. They are lots of fun and very entertaining. We left at around 11, as we still had the unpleasant drive back home, and I still had to feed Scraps.

L. got a lot of activity-type gifts for xmas: crafts, games, science experiments, etc. She’s already long finished with the books she got for xmas. She has plenty of activities to keep her busy for a while. We have stuck to our guns on the ‘no video games’ despite her begging and whining for some type of game system, “even the little hand ones”. M & I both feel that they are mind-numbing time wasters that contribute nothing to becoming a better person or making the world a better place. She held out some vague hope that Santa would come through for her, but was so happy with what she did get that she has forgotten all about her gaming-system lust and we haven’t heard anything more about it. She will continue to be “the only child in the universe” who doesn’t have one.

My word for the year is ‘simplify’. That’s my focus right now, and I’m taking baby steps in that direction. I want to apply this word to everything, but most of all to our ‘stuff’. We simply don’t need all the stuff that we’ve accumulated through the years, and I am working hard to purge whatever I can and organize the rest. I am dreading the storage area of our basement, but I’m going to force myself to tackle it this year. I’m not a ‘New Year’s Resolution’ kind of person. No need to set myself up for failure. I do intend to keep that word as a guiding mantra throughout 2009. I think I can handle that much of a commitment.