It is new year’s day. I would like to wish all of you a happy new year, but it occurs to me to wonder: Who actually celebrates New Year’s Day? All of our celebrations occurred last night, but on any other day of the year I’d have said that the first hour after midnight, and indeed all the time until I went to bed, was still part of the previous day. Today’s festivities include sleeping late and eating leftovers, and hoping we can get everyone’s biological clocks turned back for the resumption of normal activities tomorrow.

As for progress reports, I pushed to finish my work last night, and to clean up the kitchen, and to get to bed. I’m back; that’s progress.

Happy New Year, everyone. It is now 2008.

–M. J. Young

I had a bit of trouble making our New Year’s Eve celebration work; it seems that one of our cookie sheets deteriorated to extinction over the past year, and another had something stuck to it no one could identify or remove, so we had to make due with one large baking sheet and several pizza pans, which meant a lot more scrubbing up between courses. On the other hand, despite cutting back on my usual purchases, I have quite a few menu entries still in the freezer as the night begins to end.

I would have done some of this earlier, but despite being a holiday it is still Monday, and my mother-in-law still had to do her grocery shopping, so I lost about four hours from the day for that. Fortunately, I had people helping me at this end, so food was already being prepared by the time I reached the party.

We played a game which my eldest gave me for Christmas, a trivia game called Such & Such. It’s interesting, but is pretty much a cross between Password and Outburst, with the twist that all answers are two parts connected. It was fun, except that members of our team kept wandering out of the room and had to be called back.

I’m pretty tired, but I’ve already opened the forum threads (hours ago, actually), so I’m going to answer them as well as I can before calling it a night.

–M. J. Young

Two years ago tonight I mentioned making preparations for New Year’s Eve, but I did not mention anything about our celebration. There’s not much to it, really, but it’s a bit of an extravagance. I buy quite a few foods I would not buy at any other time of year, from pizza rolls to spinach puffs to pigs in a blanket to potato skins to mini eclairs. My evening is spent getting such things as french toast sticks and chicken dippers and potato puffs heated and served in a continuing feast, along with making a punch that contains soda, several fruit juice concentrates, and sherbet. At midnight we bang pots and open doors (this was much more difficult when we tried to keep all the cats inside, but that seems to be an objective we have abandoned, and the cats do not wish to be inside when this racket is raised). My wife is big on the tradition of chasing out the old year and letting the new one arrive; I’m in it for the food.

I mention it because that’s where I was late this afternoon, first visiting the store that

1. closes early on Sunday
2. has the best prices and
3. will be limited in selection,

and then going to the other store where I can get those items not available at the first, as long as I am willing to pay for them.

I did a bit of editing on the Romans notes–my pastor, who took the time to encourage me after church and to thank me for the Corinthians list which he says he is compiling into his own file copy, is looking forward to being able to browse through them when I’ve finished. I’ve also started writing a new song, about passing through a portal to a new world, which I keep poking at when I’m driving or otherwise intellectually underoccupied, but which I keep telling myself to save for Thursday so that I can involve Baxter and Brittany in the process, both of whom are hoping to get a bit of teaching on how to write songs from me, and not to snub Adam, he should be part of it, too. If it comes out well, we’ll add it to the Collision repertoire.

So I guess I’ve been busy, although the largest single thing in terms of time I did yesterday was take an early evening nap, which by then I needed.

–M. J. Young