Happy New Year

It looks like we survived yet another year.  Today is the first day of the rest of your life and the first day of 2009 - which you and I will both get wrong on checks and other documents for at least a week or so.

Looking back on 2008, it has been an interesting year -  

• Our baby had a baby. 
• Our son went back to Australasia. 
• I managed not to drop a motorcycle on myself, although I did get to pick mine up a couple of times, no damage accrued to anything besides my ego.
• New school for our other grandson with a relatively trauma-free change.
• Second year of new employment completed and they still put up with me.
• No health aberrations like the GI bleed from 2007.
• HD TeeVee arrived and it is great!
• New boss at the office; mixed returns on this one.
• New working quarters - definitely not thrilled about this one.
• Really great reunion of old cold warriors in Texas - folks I had not seen in many years were there, and it was good to meet (and to re-meet) some of them.
• Added to the library several books written by folks that were in Security Service with me, and learned a lot more about intelligence operations of that era.

On the whole, interesting but relatively devoid of significant aberrations.  May there be more like this past year.

No really interesting New Year's Resolutions, save for one not to make them any more since it feels so bad to fail to meet the expectation.  I do have plenty of tasks for the coming year, but right now it is too soon to start enumerating them - and they'd probably shortly become a truly frightening heap.  

The coming year will bring network upgrades and changes here at home - the advent of the HD TeeVee gives a monitor good enough to actually use a computer attached to it, and the media center PC will be doing that duty upstairs.  The gaggle of machines downstairs will be replaced by a Microsoft Home Server (something Gates&Co managed to get right), and the flaky mail server will be replaced by different software running in the home server.  My new desktop will be fast enough to be useful, finally - and to the rest of the hardware may be added a laptop or netbook for Phyllis - that part is still pending.  We'll bring her into the electronicized fold yet!

We are using Skype and Facebook to keep up with our wandering son, and Picasa forphoto resources.  It is all working together nicely and as long as he doesn't get too busy to do maintenance we always have new pictures and storis to tell folkswho ask. As yet we have no idea how long he will be staying there, but I'm sure he'll let us know when the time is right, whatever that means.  Maybe some Australian girl will manage to tie him down.

I've been finding high school classmates on FaceBook and MySpace, much to my surprise. Most folks my age don't want to be bothered but apparently many of us are still with it enough to take on the challenge.  Reconnecting with some of these folks after so many years has been a real eye-opener in many ways - helps keep me sharp, I guess.  It is always interesting to reconnect and see if I still recognize anyone.

Well, everyone have a Happy New Year.