jimsjournal
| A brand new year -- 01/01/02 |
Here we go... into a brand new year, nice and shiny new, no dents, no rust spots, bright and gleaming with hope and promise and possibilities...
We did not have a wild and crazy New Year's Eve around here... hmmm, you say you're not a bit surprised? Two years ago we greeted the new year -- the New Millenium (yes, you and I know that the actual new millenium didn't begin until a year later, but that's what everyone was calling it) -- with a family gathering (Nancy's mother, Nancy's sister Janet and her husband and their two daughters) and Sean (and Jennifer made it home from her job in a restaurant kitchen just in time for midnight) and we greeted the new year with a champagne toast. One year ago was a really quiet low key time, just Nancy and me, watched a video (can't even remember what it was), watched Times Square at midnight...
Last night was sort of in between those two... we had invited the same people... but Nancy's mother was having back problems and decided that she should stay home... Nancy's sister was having some bad sinus problems but she and her family did come and we had a very pleasant time sitting around in the kitchen, chatting and munching... Nancy and I fixed lasagna for dinner (two pans of lasagna... one plain and one with ground turkey that I had seasoned in Italian sausage style) and I made a nice salad and some garlic bread and some bruschetta (yummy) and we had some nice chianti... Coffee and tea and Christmas cookies afterward, along with a very nice applesauce cake Nancy had baked using my great-grandmother's recipe. Janet and Tom had brought a Shrek DVD and we watched that after dinner. Nancy and I had only seen a few brief parts of the movie so we had a marvelous time watching it... amusing and interesting and fun to watch. This being a DVD we were able to enjoy some of the extra features, such as the special sing-along scene and a Shrek trivia quiz.
Our visitors left a little before nine o'clock. Jennifer had gone to Boston for First Night and was staying over with friends there. Sean went out to a party about ten o'clock (returning a few minutes past one a.m.)... Then I was torn between two options: a Sex in the City marathon on HBO and a Twilight Zone marathon on another channel (the SciFi channel I think)... which I settled by watching an episode of one, then switching to watch an episoode of the other... back and forth... Nancy watched a little bit but was feeling tired and went upstairs to read... tuning our tv to something on the Rhode Island public tv station... I came up and joined her just in time for that station to sign off at 11:30 (yeah, kind of a low budget operation) so we switched to HGTV... cut to Dick Clark for midnight... actually, didn't switch quite in time, the ball had just dropped... wished each other a happy new year and Nancy went to sleep. I stayed up almost forty-five minutes longer... although I was still mostly awake a little while later when Sean came home....
Got up around six-thirty, fed a starving cat (well, from the way he carries on, you would think he was starving), made coffee, brought in the morning paper and read it while I ate a dish of cereal... much later in the morning I went out for a run... it was wonderful... bright sunny day... temperatures in the mid-twenties... I ran my bike path course: half a mile to the bike path... there's a mile marker about a quarter of a mile along the path... I turned around at the next mile marker... so, mile and three-quarters out, mile and three-quarters back, a very pleasant three and a half miles.
Around noon Nancy and I went shopping... yeah, Tuesday at Ames discount store, use my over-55 geezer card and save an extra ten percent... but I picked up an inexpensive 2002 weekly calendar book -- $2.50 marked down to $1.50, which meant $1.35 after my extra discount... yeah, I'm easily amused... I love to save money on things like that, makes me feel better about buying extra quality in more important things (like buying Bass Ale or Guiness Stout instead of something like Budwater, uh, I mean Budweiser.)
Oh, the wild and hectic pace of life here in the fast lane! *grin* Best wishes to you all for this new year...
[Hey, and take a look... I changed my home page design... probably about time after more than five years... I'm not exactly crazy about the new look, but at least it's a change...]
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