Happy New Year!

Welcome to 2008! I can't believe that another year has gone by. What did everyone do for New Years Eve? We didn't do much. We had leftover pizza and salads and watched several episodes of CSI Miami, then we shot off some fireworks. We invited our neighbors Bill and Jennifer to come down and shoot them off with us, but Bill wasn't feeling well. So, Jennifer came down without him and we had a good time. We only spent about an hour out there and came in probably around 9:30, because it was too stinking cold. Then, we layed in bed watching another episode of CSI Miami. We had planned to watch the New Year's Eve specials on TIVO, but we only have TIVO in the living room and didn't want to get out of bed, because it was too cold. So, we were going to just watch the rest of the show "live" and see the ball drop then go to bed. At some point in time, Scott flipped it over to football (for what he says was approximately 2 minutes or less) and I fell asleep (if you are surprised by this, you don't know me very well...everyone knows how much I LOVE football). So, he tried to stay awake so that he could wake me up just before midnight and he fell asleep. So, at 1:30, I woke up to the light and the tv on and woke Scott up just to tell him we missed the ball dropping! Then, we turned everything off and went back to sleep. Pretty lame, huh? I think that is the first time in my life I have slept through ringing in the New Year. The picture above is a picture that Scott and I took when Jennifer ran home to get her gloves. Hee hee.

Here is a picture of our "Grand Finale". It was called Main Squeeze. It went on for quite a while. It would stop and then start again. I was pretty impressed! Just an aside, if it had not been raining a good bit the last couple of weeks, we would NOT have done fireworks. We got almost an inch last week and then a little over 2 inches this Friday and this weekend.

This is our neighbor Jennifer. She is really sweet. Scott and I have also spent New Years Eve 2006 and 2005 with Bill and Jennifer at their house, playing games and eating food.

We have been fairly productive today, but not as productive as we probably would have been if there hadn't been a CSI Miami marathon on TV. What can we say, we like CSI Miami. We took down all of our inside Christmas decorations. I have cooked enough food for an army. Last week, we ate the last of some vegetable soup that I had cooked a while back and frozen and I realized that we had eaten all of our "reserves". That's what I call it when I cook stuff like chili, spaghetti, and vegetable soup that you can cook a ton of at once and then freeze what you don't eat in a couple of meals. Also, we are going to have a covered dish Sunday at church and I am taking a meal to Maggie on Saturday. I figured, hey, I will be home all day, I'll get some stuff cooked up. I had already planned for Scott's and my New Years Day meal to be a roast pork. Needless to say, I did a lot of cooking today. I cooked a huge pot of spaghetti, chili, two whole chickens minus the legs, which I froze for frying later (including shredding the meat off the bones to prepare it for inclusion in casseroles), and a pork roast with carrots, potatoes, and onions. Oh, and when Scott had gone to the store yesterday on his day off, he found a really good deal on some sirloins, so we prepared a marinade for those as well so that we can have them tomorrow night. I will say that I am a purist when it comes to steak and I usually will not put anything on them except for some seasoned meat tenderizer. However, we have found a few things that I will put on a steak: Scott's cousins who live in TN gave us a recipe for a really good rub made from seasoned salt (or maybe it's seasoned meat tendrizer), garlic salt, onion salt, and butter salt and his cousins who we visited on Christmas day cooked steaks with a marinade made from three parts soy sauce, one part jalapeno juice (from the jarred jalapenos), the juice from half a lemon, and a few chopped up jalapenos from the jar. Now, I will also tell you that I do not do super spicy stuff because of my stomach, but this was not really spicy. I really didn't think it was spicy at all. We tasted ours before putting our steaks in it and it was just right: flavorful but not a lot of heat.

Well, I guess that is enough rambling for now. Happy New Year to you all and we wish you the very best. May your blessings be overflowing and may you grow closer to the Lord every day!