Entering 2012

Yikes, I've had this post saved under "drafts" since January 3rd, and still haven't published it.  Okay, New Year's Eve...here it is: 

I'm a little sleepy but I still need to talk about New Year's, so this is going to be the short version.  For New Year's we had a small get-together at our house with Shannon and Jeremy, Sarah, Becky and Steve, and almost all associated kids.  Everyone showed up at our house between 7:00 and 7:30.  For the first hour or so, we just hung out and chatted.  After that, Becky and Shannon played a game of shot glass checkers, which was pretty damn entertaining to watch.  As the name suggests, all of your checker pieces are actually shot glasses, and every time your opponent captures one of your pieces, you have to down the shot.  Since it would have been sheer insanity to take that many shots, Becky's glasses contained red wine, and Shannon's contained margarita mix.  Ultimately Shannon won the game, which meant more casualties for Becky to gulp down.  That didn't sound right.  I'm too tired to go back and fix it though, so moving on...

After checkers, we all played "Apples to Apples."  I mentioned this already, but that game is so hysterical.  And pretty screwed up too, depending on who the judge is for each round (I swear a little fear would enter my heart each time Steve judged).  We played the game all the way until the countdown.  During the countdown, we did our usual ritual of running outside and banging pots and pans.  Afterwards, the kids wouldn't stop blowing their party whistles, so Clint stole them one by one and kept throwing them into the fireplace.  Okay, I realize this sounds jacked up, but it was really funny.  Shannon, in particular, was driving him crazy with her whistle, so he chased her down, grabbed her whistle, and chucked it into the fire.  A minute later another one showed up in her mouth, so again they went tearing through the house, and whistle #2 ended up in the fireplace.  Thirty seconds later she had another one.  It was awesome.  She had somehow found a magical way to make these things materialize from thin air, just to torment my husband.  Later Elijah crept into the kitchen and asked, "Mom, where all the whistles?"  to which I replied, "Sorry, Daddy burned them all." 

After the countdown, Becky made a delicious champagne cocktail that tasted like butterscotch.  We pressured her into giving a toast.  About two minutes after saying "cheers", the power went out.  The timing for the outage was more than a little amusing, just because it came right after the countdown (not to mention Becky's toast).  We were all joking around about it being an omen of some kind.  And naturally, Jeremy was sitting there hootin' and hollering about 2012 and the end of the world.  Overall, the power was out for about an hour, I think, but with the fireplace lit and the massive quantities of candles we have in our house, it was never truly dark.  It was actually very warm and ambient.  I have to admit that I felt a little let-down when the lights finally came back on.

Once we had electricity again, everyone sort of lost steam and decided to watch a movie.  Becky, Steve, Shannon, and Jeremy stayed the night, and like last year, Clint made everyone breakfast in the morning.

This was the short version.  Makes me wonder what the long version would have been like.  A tedious yawn-fest, I'm guessing.

I never came up with resolutions for this year.  I'm still waiting to feel "resolved".