HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

Hello All,

First of all, I have to give a shout out to my wonderful wife on all the excellent work she has been doing on the blog in recent months. I, as you may have noticed, have not been posting much so the work of family blogging has been falling on her. She has been doing an excellent job lately experimenting with different formats and working on HTML, and boy is the blog looking spiffy these days.

Last night we had a fabulous time with our private New Year's party. It may be hard to call it a New Year's party since we did not stay up past 10:30, but hey, its our damn party. Anyway, we made our special pesto recipe, some bruschetta, and ate some brie cheese that we got from Trader Joe's. We have found them to be cheaper than the other yuppy grocery stores around with all their free samples and extra help to unload your cart, load up your car, and probably wipe your bottom if you want. Anyway, put all these good foods together, and this is what you get.

We also did our best to mull some cheap wine, also from Trader Joe's. To do this, you just heat some fruity red wine (you can also throw in white wine, brandy, draft cider or gasoline, depending on how exciting you want to get) along with allspice berries, whole cloves, and cinnamon sticks. You don't want to boil the wine, but just simmer it on low for about 20 minutes. We also sliced an orange and threw it in after it was done, and this really made the whole think golden.

When you add in the Simpsons movie, go to bed early, and you have one heck of a good time for Matt and Katie.

So today, being the start of the new year, Katie and I are going to solidify our personal New Year's goals. I know we already posted some of them, and I am not sure if we are going to post the rest. I am personally leaning toward no just in case some of the personal ones do not have the follow through that we were hoping.

Another thing that we are planning on for today is to further one of our mutual goals, one I will share, of regular exercise in the form of at least 30 minutes of walking every day. Today, we are going to hike the Billy Goat Trail, a circuit hike along the shores of the Potomac River in Maryland. Neither of us have ever been there, but it should be fun and since it is supposed to be in the upper 40's today, pretty comfortable by my standards.

Since we have lots of things to do, I will leave you with best wishes for the New Year and one of my favorite quotes. If you know where it is from, leave a note.

"Get busy livin', or get busy dyin'"