Happy New Year!

When we moved into our home in February, one of our new neighbors came up to introduce themselves and welcome us to the neighborhood. Among other things, she mentioned that the men on the street have a tradition where they all get together on New Year's Day and do something, but she didn't let on what exactly it was that they did. For the next 10 months I wondered and worried about what the "tradition" was. I had convinced myself that it had to involve guns!

Well, I found out at the block Christmas party a few weeks ago that it did not indeed involve guns. The custom was for all the men to meet up New Year's Day and follow a tradition from the Ukraine. It is good luck for a male to be the first person through the door in the New Year, so we all met up in the cul-da-sac at 12:30 in the afternoon and went to each house to greet the families a Happy New Year and to enjoy a little snack and an alcoholic beverage.

It was actually quite fun! Since I'm not much of a drinker anymore, I paced myself and didn't have too much to drink. But, one could have gotten their drink on! Everyone had a nice supply of liquor to share with their neighbors. I limited myself to one frozen mudslide and a 7 & Seven, the rest of the houses I enjoyed a Diet Pepsi.

At the last home we stopped at, we enjoyed an hour or so of billards in their basement.
An unusual way to spend a day, but very much fun indeed!

Another thing that I want to talk about (all the time) on this here blog is movies!
When you have two kids under the age of 2 1/2 you don't get to see too many movies.

New Year's Eve we watched Cinderella with my 2 year old son Elias. As you may know, I regard many of Disney's animated classics as some of the best films ever made. Cinderella is one of the all time greats, and it's always fun to share these movies with Elias, for the first time. He enjoyed it, he liked the mice. And then after the stepsisters rip Cinderella's dress and she runs into the backyard, Elias shouted, "Oh No! Cinderella is running away to the circus!" I don't know where that came from!?!

On the 1st, we watched Fever Pitch with Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore. This is a result of sending my wife to the video store. It wasn't that bad, Jimmy Fallon was actually pretty good... much better than he was in that piece of crap "Taxi."

The next night we say Grizzly Man, a documentary about this guy who lived with wild grizzly bears for 13 summers until he and his girlfriend were eaten alive by one! This grizzly man had recorded over 100 hour of footage of him with the bears, including an audio only tape of him and his girlfriend being eaten. The whole movie builds up to this tape, but then then don't play it. In some sick way I was disappointed, until I realized that hearing it would have given me nightmares for the rest of my life!