new years

Dudes, I've had a martini and I'm using a Mac, so we'll see how this goes.

The last week of December was AWESOME. I worked and Pat and Greta were home, but I got caught up on a bunch of work and it was so nice having them around. I really cherished 99.95% of it. The other less than 1% included honest moments of me being annoyed with having my family around while I was working, but seriously, that's not a lot considering it is usually very, very quiet here for more than 40 hours a week and I really, really like quiet.

Anyway, I loved having my family here, and it felt like a reset button was pushed in more ways than one. It just felt like a very happy time, but things must go back to normal at some point, and they headed back to their respective posts on Monday, which was also nice.

New Year's Eve, itself, in a word, was rockin'. We went to our friends' Frank, Joyce, and Nathan's house, and we stayed until Greta's normal bedtime, thinking we'd get Greta to bed at a reasonable hour and also avoiding the drunkards on the road. But then Pat told Greta she could stay up until midnight if she wanted to, and I clarified that if she stayed up she would have to watch adult TV and "not complain," and Greta did just that. Aside from running to the basement at various points in the evening to get water paints and Greta painting a picture of a chameleon and The Little Mermaid, she was a total trooper. She started to look a little peaked around 11:15, and then Pat Reed instituted a family dance party. It was a great night.

Here are Pat and Greta watching Dick Clark's Rockin' New Year's Eve.

Here's the family dance party.

Roooock!

On Sunday we went to my parents' house to have lunch for my dad's birthday. The entire family helped prepare the meal, which was fun. Here are Phil and Greta working on the scampi part of the shrimp scampi.

We hope everyone had a wonderful end of 2010 and start of 2011!

Fran

That's right, folks! The web designer portion of the pnf.com duo redesigned the site for the new year (for the first time in six years [six years!]). He will soon be ending his blog-writing strike to introduce you to some of the new features; they should be fairly intuitive, though.
 
We hope you like the new site. More importantly, we hope you had a great end to 2008 and have a wonderful start to 2009. Here's to good things in the new year!
 
PS - We hope you enjoyed your extra second and that you used it wisely!
 
Fran

I was recently thinking of what my resolution for 2009 should be, and I thought, I should make my 2009 resolution be that I don't get so stressed out over stuff I can't control (secondarily making me a nicer person), but then I realized that was my resolution last year. And probably the year before too. Damn it. It always works for a while, but why can't I make it stick?

(I love someecards; they always know just the thing to say.)

So what's your resolution? Maybe it will give me an idea for something I might actually be able to attain.

If you don't have a resolution, then just tell me what you're doing for New Years.

And if you don't want me to know what you're doing for New Years, then perhaps you could tell me a entertaining story about an embarrassing thing a friend of yours ever did.

Be safe.

Franny