holiday wrap up

Happy New Year y'all.

We finished 2007 with a New Year's Eve party at a friend's house followed by a weird dog walk with Ginny and Chili through our neighborhood. I say weird walk because neighbors were firing the sort of sky-borne exploding fireworks you usually see at city 4th of July venues. The 'show' was complete with smoke, loud noises, and bottle rockets. As we turned the corner on our own street, a bottle rocket misfired from the other end of the street and came whizzing along the ground like a flaming guided missile straight at us. Ginny ducked for cover between Danny's legs but Chili lunged forward to happily tackle it. Australian Cattle Dogs (think Mel Gibson's break through movie The Road Warrior) don't fear much of anything at all. I could just imagine our own little Crocodile Chili say, "By Crikey, that's not a bottle rocket!" Fortunately, the thing didn't hit us and Chili didn't rip into it. The whole walk felt and sounded sort of like a bad night in downtown Baghdad though. Fortunately, knowing people would be noisy we didn't take Abby out walking. She's terrified of fireworks from puppy hood incidents.

New Years Day, we ended our holiday by spending the afternoon at Universal Studios where we watched some of the Macy's parade, rode the Revenge of the Mummy roller coaster and the Men In Black Space Aliens ride, previewed the new Disaster! ride, and spent some more quality time with the Terminator at his show. The Disaster venue features some dandy holographic type special effects with Christopher Walken but needs some more work on the actual ride sequence in the subway. We explored Woody Woodpecker and Curious George's kiddie park where we would have played if the darn kiddies weren't there. Universal was pretty crowded, but the day was a nice end to the holidays.

About an hour after we returned home, it got gall dang cold! It stayed nippy all day today as well. It's now about 40 degrees out with a pretty nifty arctic wind. Brrr.

Tonight, after watching the movie, The Kingdom on DVD we bundled up, put the dogs (faux) sheepskin lined car coats on them and walked. I wore exercise stretch pants under my fleece pants, a sweater, a hooded sweatshirt, a vest, my ski type jacket , a hat, and ski gloves! You'd think I was preparing for a jaunt to the North Pole or something. That's what comes of living three decades in generally warm Florida...I can't handle cold anymore.

Tomorrow, back to the real world of settling estates, taxes, house updates and house selling, and trying to figure out insurance crap. Ugh. Can't we have Christmas again?

Live long and prosper.