One more for the road

We're planning on a quiet night at home tonight. I'm making Chex Mix; earlier I made spinach dip, and Bob boiled shrimp, which is cooling in the refrigerator. There's also a bottle of Martini & Rossi Asti Spumanté in there chilling. The plan is to watch The Return of the King, but Bob's upstairs right now playing Half Life 2, and I thought I might play a little Sims.

I always give a lot of weight to the beginning of a New Year. It feels like a new beginning even though it's obviously just an arbitrary, and thus meaningless, date. But it always feels good to make that division, and so I bought a new journal, this Jordi Labanda journal:

and I'm making a commitment to write in it -- I'm not making any resolutions, really, this year, but I'm making some suggestions to myself, and one of them is to write by hand more often. It's different than writing on the computer, I think. There seems to be something about writing by hand that engages the heart more, maybe. I guess it takes more thought sometimes. And I do think that things written by hand are more easily remembered; there's something about the motion of writing the words that kind of engraves them on the brain cells, or something.

I'm also going to try to knit up a lot of the yarn that I have in my stash. I'm not making any promises not to buy any more, in fact I ordered some just the other day, some oatmeal-colored wool to use to make another poncho. Just like writing by hand, there's something about knitting that, to me, seems to wind memories in with the yarn.

I also seem to associate whatever book I was reading around the same time as I was knitting something; the burgundy poncho I was working on while we were on vacation will always make me remember Anne Tyler's The Amateur Marriage, which I bought in the airport and read on the plane home, and the Silk Garden scarf I just finished will make me remember Kage Baker's The Life of the World to Come, which I also just finished.

Even though, as I said, it's an arbitrary date, I'm just as glad for this year to end. There have just been so many tragedies, both personal and global, and I look forward to the new year with hope that we will all find peace and contentment in our lives and in the world. Happy New Year!

Tomorrow: More vacation pictures, including The Many Moods of Bob.