Last Post for 2005
Geez, two steps forward, three steps back. For every item I manage to put away, 3 more come through the door. Not just fun stuff either. I'm not griping about gifts. It's everything: mail, fresh laundry. I went out to the garage to stash something and noticed there is a mountain of empty boxes. We need to break a few of those down and gift them to Mr. Recycling Man and I'm not clear on this but he's coming tomorrow? Sunday, Jan 1st instead of Monday the 2nd? Maybe I'm dreaming.

I had a good birthday although it got off to a rugged start. Both Bob and I are fighting colds. I think Bob's a little worse off than I am although neither or us is in very bad shape. But it's the thing where you wake up feeling gross and once you've moved around, drank some tea and showered, you're at about 90%.

I knew I wanted to see a movie and I knew where I wanted to go for dinner, Roots which is completely on the far east side of Vancouver, technically Camus. This made the location of the movie matter and somewhat also the timing. Brokeback Mountain wasn't going to work which left my other choice: King Kong. Did you know that movie is 3 hours long?

That made me cranky (see above about just woke up and cold symptoms). I checked out a few other movies but really the only other thing I might have wanted to see was Chronicles of Narnia, which I've already seen once. I whined a bit and Bob asked me what I wanted to do and I said, "I want to see King Kong and I want it to be shorter."

He indicated that this was 1 birthday wish he could not make come true and after some more consulting of the movie times, we decided to see an early King Kong and then go to dinner.

Other than being too long, King Kong is an excellent and thrilling movie. It took about 10 years off my life. (It also made me cry.) Wild, scary stuff. At one point, during the Skull Island part, there was this endless scene involving huge bugs. I squirmed in my seat for about 5 minutes and then leaned over to Bob and said, "We're NEVER going there." And unless they have a hippie jam band festival, I think he agrees.

Dinner was fantastic. We hardly ever splurge on a super deluxe meal and this was worth every penny. We shared a crab and avocado appetizer and a beet salad and our entrees were filet mignon with some sort of bleucheese butter (!) and grilled wild salmon with greens. For dessert we split a Kahlua creme brulee. I must learn how to make this dessert.

Great day. Great year. A couple more days off to clean up and more Photoshop and updating my iPod with new tunes and playlists. I'm also big on cleaning things out at new years. Like the bathroom cupboard. You know you always find about 4 bottles of sunscreen with 1 tiny squish left or some bath gel that you forgot you had. And I'm going to take down the tree and put away the holiday stuff. And I'm going to process Mr. Pumpkin. I will most likely photo-document it for you here so stay tuned.

Happy New Year.