Tag: New Year

It is All Gone

And just like that, all of the xmas decorations have been removed from the living areas of the house and placed back in the cellar storage.

Insert an emphatic sigh of relief here. We can start 2025 now.

Oh wait… 2025 is going to suck… crap, let’s put the xmas stuff back up and see if we can stave off the inevitable societal collapse.

HoHoHoly crap.

New Years Day

How’s your New Years Day going? I slept late. I didn’t fall asleep until 2:00am and I woke up at a little after 7:00am… so I slept REALLY late and am still completely exhausted. Hooray.

The only definite item on today’s agenda is taking down all of the xmas decorations. I can’t wait! I’m so excited for that. I love how much my family loves xmas, but I also love it when we put it away for another year. I want my house back, you know?

HoHoHappy New Year!

Happy New Year

It’s 12:22am here in Massachusetts. 2025 is 22 minutes old and the world hasn’t ended yet. So far so good.

Happy New Year, everyone! Let’s duck and cover and try to ride out the impending shit storm as best we can.

New Years Eve Bonus!

The plan was to have dinner with the whole family after Jen and I finished work for the day. Then my step daughter, Bellana, was going to head back to Vermont. After that we, meaning me, my wife Jen, and my step son Harry, would ring in the New Year together by probably watching a movie or something. Harry was planning to go back to Vermont on Sunday so we’d have him here for the rest of the week.

Now things have changed! Bellana’s Vermont plans have fallen through and she is staying with us until Sunday too! BONUS!

Our Happy New Years Eve plans just got happier! Both kids are here for the holiday! Awesome!

New Years Resolutions

I don’t have any set ideas for New Years Resolutions. Just the usual stuff. Do I want to do something different this year and actually define a single resolution for the year and then stick to it (as if)? I don’t know.

Here are some possibilities…

  • Make more music both with and without the band. We’re talking about starting the band-ball rolling again in January. Please please please let it stick this time. I really miss playing in a band and I really, really don’t want to have to find a new one.
  • Listen to more music. I need to pay more attention to the musical world around me and just listen to more stuff. Old stuff, new stuff, borrowed or blue stuff. It doesn’t matter. Just listen to more stuff.
  • Experience live music again. I went to two concerts in 2024 (I think). One of them involved my daughter. The other involved Iron Maiden. I need to see more bands playing live. I missed a handful of shows that in my much younger days I would not have missed. Getting old makes this difficult but I should at least try to do better.
  • Take more photos. Digital or film, it doesn’t matter. Take more photos. Learn more about taking photos. Learn new techniques, try new things. I have a medium format camera now and I have taken exactly one photo with it. Get off your ass and take more photos.
  • Be more social. Either with family or friends. Covid is over. Deal with it. Stop living like a fucking hermit, you fucking hermit.
  • Drive to Vermont to annoy the kids more often. Heh heh heh, yeah.
  • Adopt another cat. We’ve been a two cat household for almost two years. Is it time to resolve to adopt a third? Yes. Maybe. Probably not, but yes.

That’ll do for now. I’ll think about other ideas to add over the next few days. 2025 is four days away.

Skipping a Year

Yesterday I posted something about how I used to do New Years day posts where I posted one picture from each month as a year in review kind of thing. I said I was still thinking of doing one for 2023.

I just went through my Flickr trying to decide which pics to use for the post…

…and it turns out that most months don’t have anything worth highlighting. It was a nice quiet year but photographically? There are long stretches of time where there’s nothing special to look back on. There are lots of guitar pictures and lots of cat pictures and not a whole lot else.

Oh well. Let’s try to make 2024 a little more visually interesting, m’kay?

Maybe I am just old and uninteresting now. Not that I was ever very interesting to begin with.

Resolutions

Anyone out there making New Years Resolutions this year? 2020-2022 will be remembered as a non stop avalanche of suck. Is that enough to make you not look toward the imminent new year as something to be endured rather than something to strive for?

I’m not making any New Years Resolutions. Mainly because the obligatory go to is to lose weight and if I lose as much in 2023 as I did in 2022 I’d end up weighing something like 40 pounds and that, dear readers, would not look very good on me.

I could resolve to get the band back together or to write more songs or to practice guitar more. None of those things really meet the spirit of the thing though, you know?

So yeah, no 2023 resolutions for this guy here. I think it’s more appropriate to just duck and cover and ride out the coming shit storm.

Happy New Year. Two hours and 24 minutes to go.

New Years Day

The New Year has arrived. Happy January 1, 2022 (2020 too, and yes I expect to write it that way forever).

2020 was the most difficult year of my life, thanks to Covid-19, and when it ended I was elated and hopeful for the future. There was a vaccine and soon enough we’d all have it and Covid-19 would be over.

2021 turned out worse. All of that elation was for nothing. We are in a worse situation than ever, Covid-ily speaking, and my parents had such a terrible time health wise that I spent most of the year cycling through feelings of heartbreak, anxiety, frustration, anger (at myself), and crushingly crippling guilt. I managed to make life worse for pretty much everyone I care about.

So if you’re wondering why I am so happy to put 2021 behind us… there you go.

2022 (2020 too) is a welcome change, even though it is literally meaningless, but I don’t feel the optimism I felt last year. Right now I feel a sense of impending doom. How much worse can things get? What will the next nightmare turn out to be? Will Covid-19 mutate into something worse, like a zombie virus? Will Aliens invade and turn us into gourmet meals? Will Bill Gates activate the microchips and melt what’s left of our brains?

I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

I have a few resolution-type things. More like goals than resolutions.

  • Weight. In a couple of weeks I will go to Lowell General Hospital to drop off some paperwork. Next month I will have a Zoom appointment to start the weight loss surgery process. I am utterly terrified of this. I tried to do it once before and cancelled the first appointment out of fear. I couldn’t deal with it. The difference this time is I am more terrified of not doing it. It’s time. I can’t keep living like this. The goal then is to get to the end and have the surgery and then follow the proper post-surgical requirements. We postponed Harry’s graduation present/trip to Disney World that was supposed to happen during the summer of 2020. It is now planned for January 2023. I want all of this to be behind me by then. If it’s not then I’ll deal, but that’s my hope.
  • Get my parents’ house ready to sell. I had planned on chipping away at this over the last few months but my back has been in such bad shape I haven’t had it in me (see the previous entry on the list). Also, Covid. Shit. I don’t want to let anyone down again. I want to do this right.
  • Play with the band again. It’s not a want. It’s a need. It’s a mental health thing. I need this. We were talking about the possibility of a get together a month or so ago, but then omicron ass fucked everything. Now? I don’t know.
  • See the Harry Potter reunion special. This one is totally attainable. In fact, I am going to hit post and go watch it now.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Happy New Year!

As the clock struck midnight I gave my beautiful wife a kiss and then we opened the front door and booted 2021’s ass out to the street while the kids opened the side door and welcomed 2022 in. Then we all hugged out our relief at the end of the shit year that was 2021.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!