2011 has been another crazy year, and our lives haven’t gotten any less hectic — or fantastic. One of our life-changing updates this year was the purchase of our first home. The process was certainly a roller coaster, but our love for the new home has not been. It’s already become a very major part of our lives, especially as Ian continues to grow up and explore his new home.
This year, for our Christmas Card, we invite you to explore our new home through the memories we’ve made there. You’ll see a few of the rooms of our house. In each room, you’ll find some Christmas ornaments. Hover on the ornament to see a video clip, photograph, or other memory that took place in that room. We promise they’re adorable.
Well, it’s a new year. Truth be told, I’m a little wary of this year. 2010 had such beautiful mathematical properties. 2011 just seems… off. However, 2011, has a ton of promise, with a lot of big things coming up.
To launch this year, I’ve put up a new mixlist. Actually, I put up two. I just realized that I never posted my 2009 Best Of… mixlist. So, I made pages for both of them. I didn’t dig into the songs as deeply as with the 2008 Best Of…, so don’t expect to read much on those pages. Also included were the Grooveshark embedded players.
And now, to sleep. Perchance to dream. Likely to have to get up three or four times with my son.
It’s New Year’s Eve and, so far, most of our conversation has been about snowflakes. It’s a long story.
We’re about to watch 9. We had a couple plans for tonight — one was to watch episodes from our favorite TV shows that take place during New Year’s Eve. That is a fine idea until you endeavor to figure out which episodes those might be. IMDB plot searches proved fruitless.
The next plan was to watch a movie that takes place, at least in part, during New Year’s Eve. This, too, was largely fruitless for the same reasons. Also, I couldn’t recall a single movie we own taking place (in whole or part) during New Year’s Eve.
Our final plan was to rent something from iTunes. We enacted this same plan over Christmas at the Gregg household. There we purchased “Four Christmases”, which took about sixty minutes to download (and produced about three minutes of laughter). Tonight we’ve purchased “9”, which took about twelve minutes to download. Thank you, MidcoNet high-speed broadband internet.
So far I’m enjoying “9”. Check it out. As Holli put it, it’s kinda fitting that we’re watching “9” on the last day of 2009. That’s totally what we meant to do, yo.
The cheerless chill that has descended upon us is one I connect to the maroon-shaded gaze of Lord Voldermort. It’s a cold that I’ve associated with the oft-written “chilled me to the bones”. For what has been a relatively mild winter, recent weeks have yielded a fresh bought of low temperatures and high snowfall.
Our travels last Christmas from Big Stone City, SD, to Sioux Falls, SD, had been a harrowing misadventure, during which we witnessed a handful of stranded vehicles, many of which my father took the time to rescue. Mostly, though, it was 10 mph “white knuckle” driving though terrible roads, low visibility, and general fatigue.
This year, we thought we were free of such a torment. Instead, once we were outside of Milbank, the blowing snow hit. I had, hitherto, never considered “blowing snow” to be anything close to dangerous. ‘What harm is there,’ I thought, ‘when you can drive right through it?’ Then we hit enough blowing snow to create white-out-like conditions, and I knew the harm. It was like driving through cloud. Tiny, island patches of road would open up (and close) before us, offering hope and despair. Our only real guidance came in the form of the reflective road posts and occassional road signs. We did eventually make our way safely but not before a couple of tense moments.
This Christmas has been a little sad. It’s been our first time seeing a lot of these people since our news, and that reminds us of our news, which makes us sad. Plus, it’s a generally happy time, which makes one think of puppy dogs, candycanes, and babies, which makes us sad. And, by terrible coincidence, the movie we saw for Christmas day, Marley and Me, features a scene in which the couple discovers that they’ve been experiencing an Anembryonic pregnancy, which made us sad. But that’s how it is. It all just makes me all the more eager to be able to try again, which will hopefully be soon. I’ll be sure to video-blog our progress.
BUT, this holiday season is not meant to be sad. It’s meant to be a joyous time. So, to share the happiness, a happiness that Holli and I have been enjoying these past weeks, I present to you the pilot episode of the anime Bleach.
