Welcome 2011

Finally I'm back at the keyboard after a wonderful Christmas where we were so relaxed and laid-back that we ended up having Christmas dinner buffet-style in front of the television.  If you knew us you'd realize how crazy that is--we always eat at the table and TV is never part of the ambiance but it felt so good to do something different and relaxing after all those wonderful parties and dinners and get-togethers. (If that's how we go crazy around here we're pretty pathetic, huh?) And it felt good.

Then for New Year's Eve we went north.  After nearly a month of temperatures hovering around zero things decided to warm up here in Anchorage with one of our random bursts of warm air from Hawaii so we escaped north to my parents' cabin where it was a perfectly balmy 30 degrees. Perfect for snowmachining and perfect for fireworks.

Thirty degrees and plenty of snow as you can see from the picture where Andrew is snow-blowing out a path to the well so we can rev up the water pump (you can see the sun getting close to setting and it was only about 2pm or so). David followed behind him with a cinnamon roll, faithfully feeding his father every few steps whenever the man got too famished and weak to go any farther.

Must . . . have . . . cinnamon . . . roll . . .

Then that night we brought out the fireworks.  It's such a novelty to have fireworks you can actually see--normally our Independence Day fireworks are at midnight or 1am because it's too bright to see them--and even then it's only rather dusky.  But for New Year's Eve we could have started the fireworks at 4 o'clock and watched them just fine.

We waited until about 7pm before loading up the sled and setting up shop in the yard--you can see Andrew and the kids standing in the plowed-out trenches and lighting up roman candles by the aid of the shop light. 

With it so warm even I ventured out of the protection of the cabin to watch up close as they lit things up.  Anchorage has an ordinance against fireworks in the city so as long as I can remember we've had to get out of town if we want a show.  But this year they lifted the ban just for the holiday and things were popping up everywhere.

Last year we had a lunar eclipse on a blue moon for New Year's Eve and I wondered if it could be taken as a good omen for 2010. Now, looking back, even though things were shaky for the first six months it turns out that our little blue moon eclipse ended up being a pretty good indicator of the good things that eventually came our way.

It's funny how things can be going so badly but it doesn't take too long once the stress is removed for you to forget all about the negatives and remember (mostly) the positives.  I'm kind of glad our brains are like that.

With fireworks and fun and such a wonderful holiday season I'm hoping that 2011 is even better.  I'm going to turn 41 and I'm going to finish the rewrite on my book. I'm going to practice until I can do at least one honest-to-goodness push-up and I'm going to get my knee fixed/strong enough so I can run barefoot again.

I'm going to plan/save for our last official family vacation before Grace leaves for college.  I think I may also spend some time brushing up on my French after so many years of neglect.  I'm going to finish reading the Bible (I'm plodding through Deuteronomy right now) along with Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat (so far Deuteronomy is better), Anya Seton's My Theodosia and Bill Bryson's A Brief History of Nearly Everything. Plus a few more in there.

Or maybe I'll get completely wild and crazy and make this . . .



And--oh yea--I'm going to do some blogging. What are your plans?