Kim and I invited over Matt, Aaron, Laura, and Chris (along with their dog Tucker) for New Years Eve. We rented The 40-Year-Old Virgin, made dinner, got the decorations up, and got the house ready all after driving home from Duluth that morning!
I made three chicken breasts (halves), three steaks, sauteed mushrooms in a cream sauce, glazed carrots, rolls, pierogies, and shrimp cocktail. Kim made lemon bars, ham and garlic/herb cheese rollups, and got the snacks ready. We were running a bit late on the food because I expected to make the chicken and steak at the same time on the grill but the chicken breasts were so large that I couldn’t fit them all and I had to cook them in shifts. Bleh.
Aaron and Matt showed up first around 6:45 and hung out while I finished cooking. They brought some wine, beer, and Sparks! I had quite a few things going on at once and I’m surprised I kept it together as well as I did. I thank Kim for making that process a bit easier. Laura, Chris, and Tucker showed up around 7 and brought a great selection of cheese (mmm, goat cheese!), wine, and more beer (Winter Ale, good choice ;)). I had already purchased some wine, beer, and other stuff as well including some Sierra Nevada Pale Ale for Chris which he hasn’t been able to easily find since moving to the Twin Cities.
Chris, Matt, Aaron, and I played two games of Scrabble which Aaron absolutely dominated on. I had 5 rounds w/o vowels for the first game and that’s my excuse ;) but the second game I had no excuse — I just sucked it up. I think that I still lead the Scrabble series 5-2 though ;) While the Scrabble games were going on, Kimmy had popped in the DVD and I was passively paying attention while sucking at Scrabble and excelling at beer consumption ;)
After the movie stuff got a little “interesting” and my detailed recollections have no become little more than fading memories. Don’t know — maybe it was an allergic reaction to the seafood or something ;) ;) ;)
The main event came and we were all perched on our respective chairs to “jump into the New Year”. Kimmy loves this tradition and I think it’s cute only because she’s my wife. Most everyone else was “festive” enough not to care much either way ;) It was a bit of a buzz kill to see Dick Clark in his pre-recorded and post-stroke state. So very many years of watching him do the ball-drop live and while you knew it was coming eventually, the reality kind of sucked. All the plastic surgery makes him look so young — you just don’t expect him to be in such poor shape. Ryan Seacrest was apparently the main character this year — bleh, I’m not impressed. Seacrest OUT!
After we “jumped” the party continued and eventually ended around 2:45 when Laura, Chris, and Tucker packed it in for home. Aaron and Kim retired soon after but Matt and I kept it up till nearly 4. Good stuff!
Thanks guys for sharing New Years with us and have a HAPPY New Year.
This morning I was the first one up in the house and worked on doing the yearly archiving of photos in our gallery. Because of the number of images and the number of galleries we have in use, Gallery supposedly works better when you make a lot of subdirectories. In addition, it cleans up the interface and makes finding images (w/o using search) easier. It’s a little odd having so few sub-albums in the gallery for Mobile Pictures and Geocaching Pictures, but they’ll fill up soon enough. I guess I have to cache more ;)
See all the pictures from today here and here.
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