Happy 2006!

Happy new year!  This has never been one of my favorite holidays - it just always seems like New Year's is a last-chance excuse to squeeze a little more "holiday" into the holiday season, but in reality, it's more like the day I have to start thinking about returning to life in the real world. Not that that's a bad thing, really. The holiday season is OK and the chance to relax is wonderful, but I couldn't deal with it for a lot longer.

This year seemed like a particularly active holiday season for us. Usually, at least for the past few years, we've not had a lot of things going on during the holidays. This year was different, though. My family descended upon us before Christmas, and the last one just left this morning. My parents and my sister were here for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and Ed (or as I like to call him, my own personal Martha Stewart) wowed us all with his culinary expertise, not to mention his holiday decorating touch. It was kind of cool to have a "real" family Christmas just like the old days, with lots of family and good food and festive decorations, and the really cool part was that I didn't have to do anything other than clean the kitchen. As I'm the only normal one in my family, the rest of them are hard to deal with for any length of time, but Ed manages to do it better than most.

After Christmas, my sister, my parents, my brother and his two kids, and I took off for a couple of days visiting "The Happiest Place on Earth," Disneyland. While it's a fairly happy place, I'm thinking the week between Christmas and New Year's it's really more like The Crowdedest Place on Earth. We had a great time there, but the shear mass of humanity was truly amazing. Waiting in line quickly became an accepted way of life. When it took us an hour after we entered the gate just to park the car, I knew it was going to be a rough couple of days. Add on another 20-minute wait for a shuttle from the parking area to the park entrance, another 20-minute wait to buy tickets, and another 20 minutes to go through security and actually get inside, and I was pretty much exhausted before we ever got started.

Just walking around inside Disneyland felt like being a part of a giant pin-ball machine - you pretty much just move through the park by bouncing off one collision with a stranger to another. It's almost a relief to get to an attraction and stand in a slow-moving line for the ride. Of course, every attraction had a line at least an hour long, and most were closer to two hours, all for 2-3 minutes of actual ride time. How we all managed to survive that without becoming raving homicidal maniacs is beyond me, but we did. That's probably thanks to the fact that my 9-year old nephew and 12-year old niece seemed to be having the time of their lives. Experiencing Disneyland even without kids is fun, but it's a lot more fun with kids who are seeing it for the first time. I was thankful to have the chance to bond even more with those two kids. They've had a rough year, so it was very cool to have a chance to share in some happy time with them.

Now it's time to move on to another new year. 2005 was a good year personally and I'm optimistic that 2006 will be just as good. I just hope that maybe it will be a year filled with less tragedy and devastation here and around the world than 2005 was.

I'm not big on making resolutions since I know I'm not capable of keeping most that I would make, but I try to at least start the year with a positive outlook and an intention of "doing better." One of those intentions (not resolutions!) this year is to be better about keeping this little blog going. It's all a matter of keeping perspective on my job and the workload that gets so overwhelming. If I can just manage to keep all those work-related stresses in check, maybe I'll be able to find the time and energy to post blog entries more often than once a month as I've been doing of late. Whether I'll be successful or not, we'll see. I'm gonna try, though.

So anyways, here's to a prosperous and happy 2006 to all of my blog buddies!