Happy New Year

Happy New Year everyone.

We had a nice quiet New Years Eve. W stayed up until 11 watching Funniest Home Videos (I thought they would never end). Then he called his grandparents in AZ. For some reason he decided they had AZ money while they were done there and it couldn't be used here...okay. Anyway, I don't know that his grandpa was all that excited to talk to him at that time of night.

D made up a batch of his Tom and Jerry mix yesterday. He made the recipe that doesn't taste as good but holds up longer. So, I was informed he could drink those for a week. Blick. Of course W has decided he likes them and we gave H a little one last night and he loved it. Theirs were mixed with vanilla rather than the booze. I meant to mix up another batch of Irish Cream but never did. With no help to drink it, maybe I'd better not now...

We didn't have our little show out the kitchen window this year. The shanty village off our neighbors back deck never appeared, no BBQing oysters, no bonfires under the eves of the house. I think they went to their kids for the weekend. How lame is our life that we would look forward to that?

Our weather has calmed down now. This is the first year I can remember when we haven't been without power for more than a flicker. That time we spend without electricity usually helps to balance out our bill with all the Christmas lights we put up. Then again, we didn't put many lights up, so there you go. Of course the week long annual power outage helps to ensure that we at least have a deep cleaning of the fridge once a year. We are getting some wind tonight though, so I shouldn't temp fate I suppose. I think we are supposed to get 3-7 inches of rain with our wind tonight. Fun.

We finally had our scout Christmas party on Monday. It wasn't as good as we'd hoped, but I think they had fun. That's really what it's about. Since we rescheduled, we didn't have Santa. Of course it was odd going from a morning to an evening party and still having pancakes and sausage, but the kids seemed fine with it. And of course I had planned to bring their borax crystal ornament project planned for our den meeting that was cancelled. Had the party been before Christmas they could have put those on their trees after making them. Now they just get the satisfaction of making them I suppose.

Now I am looking forward to a new year. MandM should be home soon and we can resume our lunch dates. I'm getting more parents involved with scouts and can hand off some tasks. We can put away decorations and re-arrange our room and the guest room. At that point we won't have a guest room, it will be H's room. Of course the pay off will be that his toys can leave the living room. Okay, who am I kidding. Only part of them will leave the living room. We can start planning for camping trips. You know we really need to use the driveway guesthouse as more than a guesthouse. Especially since we rarely have guest. I am so looking forward to not having any parties to plan or help with, no milestone anniversaries, no retirements.

I think I have one major goal for the year. Now that D is home all the time I don't have my 2 month spells where I can be creative with food. I can tell the kids to go to bed hungry if they don't like what I've fixed. D would revolt if I did that. So, my goal is to find a happy medium between trying new recipes and keeping to good old boring stand by's. You would think that would be easy, but it really isn't. H won't eat much white stuff and isn't much for sweets. If it's not chicken nuggets and mac and cheese W won't eat it more often than once in a blue moon without complaining. He has been known to put left over mac and cheese in a tortilla or on home made pizza. D definitely isn't very adventuresome with food. He's just a real meat and potato guy and gets nervous if we stray too far from that. He just cringes to watch H and me eat the artichoke hearts they sample at Costco.

I would also like to spend a little more time in the yard this year. I have plans to make a concrete dragon snaking up and down through the yard. Maybe this year we can get a couple sections of him in. We have some rain barrels that we need to get installed on the house and gutters on the garage to feed more. I also want to move our garden to a new location. I am not happy with it along our northern property line with the evil neighbor. We have a terraced area toward the lake that gets good sun and will be close to the barrels. We'll try that for awhile.

Hope every ones year is off to a good start.