New Year's Stuff
Okay, so I'm obviously an old fuddy-duddy with a kid, so I won't be heading out on the town tonight by any means, but still, it'll be nice to be here at home for the New Year. On the flip side of that, of course, it'll be the first significant event for Ana since she's been out of Spain... Normally the Spanish spend the evening with their families and eat 12 grapes at the bells of midnight to bring in the New Year. This will be happening at 3 p.m. in the afternoon for us and I'll be at work, so I can imagine a wave of home-sickness coming on. We do get TVE International here, though, so Ana should be able to watch Las Campanatas live... That may help.
Okay, New Year Stuff: Archive emails. 2349 emails in my Personal and 1224 emails in the Sent. Those numbers are about on par as other years. I put them off in an "Archive" folder with their years Personal_2003 and Sent_2003. I have other folders, but I don't generally keep those since they're just for mailing lists, etc. I do this every year, and have archives back to 1998. It's a good system since I can generally remember what year something happened, so I can start looking there if I need an old email (I've recently had to go back and find some old invoices sent in 2001, for example). Of course it's not a perfect system, since I lost a *massive* chunk of email for 2002 during the Great Disk Drive Formatting Accident of October 2002. But in general, if I remember to back up, it's a pretty good archival system. Want to freak yourself out? Go back to December's 1998's emails and wander around for a bit to see what you were writing at the time. It's worse than reading old weblog posts. ;-)
Okay, the diet should start sometime soon as well. I'm back in the wonderful US of A so I now have both the temptation of a million bad-for-me treats and the billion dollar a year diet industry. There's no "Atkins" branded products in Spain, so before I was just doing it by shopping. Now I get to go down to the local GMC and load up on low-carb junk now and feel better from the start! Woohoo! Let the dieting begin! :-)
Actually, that reminds me that I need to get the bikes I brought back from my brother's over to the local bike shop for tuning so we can go for rides (and get off my ever increasing ass).
What else is going on for the New Year? Well, I have to get my taxes straightened out from years living abroad. I'm working with Rael on a project that needs to be focused on immediately. Shit - I still haven't prepped my ETCon tutorial and the guys at O'Reilly are waiting on the materials. I've got to get some new glasses and contacts prescriptions (I've broken my other glasses so I'm back to the same ones I was using when I *left* San Francisco - dark black frames are *so* 1990s GenX). More... I've got to finish furnishing the apartment and pay off the massive debt we incurred during the move. I've got to clean up this site and mobitopia and maybe launch some other sites (a mobile media one specifically). I've got to plan out our free time next year a bit more so the grandparents have a chance to spend time with the kid. Also I'd like for Ana to see a bit more of California: Santa Cruz, Monterey, Yosemite, Tahoe, etc.
Lots of stuff planned for the New Year. Could we pass a law for 38 hour days please? That'd be great...
-Russ