Happy New Year!

Bowl Games!
Sitting around watching Bowl games
Living off corn chips and soft drinks
Watching TV all day long...
(with apologies to Jimmy Buffett...)

Happy New Year to all of my dear readers! As is traditional for New Year's Day, we're watching college football bowl games, and right now we're making the traditional meal of ham, black-eyed peas, and greens. What are some of your New Year traditions?

Looking back, the past year was full of fun and surprises. DH and I became grandparents unexpectedly early - our three-month-old grandson is doing well and we look forward to the grandparental privilege of spoiling him rotten. We travelled to the UK over the summer, meeting a number of my online friends and seeing quite a few castles. It's good to get out of Florida once in a while! We also managed to avoid having any hurricanes this year, which suits us just fine - 2004 gave us our lifetime supply!

As far as my 2006 goals, I did fine on some, and not so fine on others:

Average one book/month - 206%. Safe to say that I completely smoked this one! Since I've started using the exercise bike, I've gotten a lot of reading done.

Get below 28% bodyfat - 42% as of October - my next weigh/measure at Curves should give a more accurate progress, but I don't think I made it.

Parish website upgrade - 100%. Done, and I'm keeping on top of updates.

Family website - 15%. Same as at the beginning of 2006. Needless to say, this will carry over!
These last two fall in the "So close, and yet so far..." category. I got sick toward the end of vacation, so any hope of finishing these the last two days of December disappeared along with my energy....

Great Decluttering - 97%. I'm three bookcases shy of having made this one.

Walk to Rivendell - 96%. Nineteen miles. That's how far I am from Rivendell at the moment.

So... on to 2007! This coming week should see the completion of the Great Decluttering and the Walk to Rivendell. Then I can start on others!

Average one book/month - This one has been a yearly goal for over a decade...

Get below 27% body fat

Family website - Having my own laptop should speed progress on this...

Walk Rivendell to Lorien (462 miles)

Walk Lorien to Rauros (389 miles)

Finish 63-squares afghan

Finish TW Fortunate Traveler - I started this in 2002, and it's about time I finished the poor fellow...
Hopefully I'll do better than last year!

Anyway, all of us at Alternate Dementia had a good Christmas. DH and I both burned our voices out singing at three Masses on Christmas Eve, including Midnight Mass, but the music was really beautiful and we enjoyed ourselves. Christmas Day we flew up to DC to visit with my family, and a good time was had by all, save for the head cold that afflicted each of us in shifts. We went into downtown DC on the 29th to visit the Air and Space Museum, which is one of my favorite museums in the DC area. We saw a very cool IMAX movie called Roving Mars, which prompted us to wiki the Mars rovers when we got back to my folks. Surprisingly, for two machines designed for 90-day missions, both have surpassed 1000 days and are still active as of end of November. We flew back home on the 30th, and spent most of the afternoon resting after having gotten up at 5:30 am, and I was in the worst day of my turn with the cold. I'm on the mend, thankfully.
Oh, and this is me: DH gave me a 30GB iPod for Christmas! I didn't have time to populate it before we had to travel, but I've been starting to load all sorts of good stuff on it. At the moment it has mostly Rush, and an album of JRR Tolkien reading selections from his books. More will follow!