Happy New Year!

Happy new year everyone! As the year begins, I am crossing my fingers that 2012 will be a little more calm for us, I’m not sure we can handle another crazy year. We spent Christmas 2011 with Karen’s family in Virginia. Karen flew up the Monday before Christmas and I flew up on Friday after work. It is not fair that she has so much time off!!!  Thankfully, the weather was great for travelling and all of our flights were on time. It is definitely different travelling by plane for the holidays, we had to be a little more mindful when buying gifts for everyone one, with an eye towards being able to pack or ship the gifts.



While we were  in VA, Karen had planned a full schedule of visiting friends and relatives, however I managed to throw a wrench in that as I started feeling progressively more sick during the visit. By Tuesday, I was feeling bad enough that it was decided that I should go to the doctor. Like most people, I have to be feeling pretty bad to be willing to go to a doctor, especially when we are out of town. I was diagnosed with Bronchitis and prescribed antibiotics and a strong, knock you on your a$$ cough medicine. As of today, I am still not feeling 100%, I’m still battling congestion and a cough. I am ready for this to go away.


We received a lot of great gifts for Christmas, everyone was way too generous. In fact, our carry on luggage could not handle all of the gifts that we acquired in VA, so we left a majority of them at her parents’ house. (They will bring them with them the next time that they come to visit) Some of my gifts were new tools, which I would have liked to bring home with me so I can put them to use. However, I wasn’t sure that TSA would approve of me carrying on a collection of new screw drivers and a big, heavy ½” ratchet wrench with a swivel head (enter your Tim Allen grunt here), so I decided against trying to pack them. With my luck, they would have confiscated them at the security checkpoint.


I worked last Thursday and Friday and then was off for a 3 day weekend over the New Year weekend. We didn’t do too much over the weekend, as I was fighting the sleepy side effects of the prescription cough medicine. We did, unfortunately, suffer through watching UVA getting beat by Auburn in the Chick Fila bowl and then Georgia’s embarrassing triple overtime loss to Michigan State in the Outback bowl. Ugh, not the way I wanted either team’s season to end. The good news is that since the SEC added two new schools to the conference (Texas A&M and Missouri), they had to rework the 2012 football schedule. That resulted in Georgia playing at Missouri in September, which is only a little over four hours away from us. We will definitely be trying to get tickets to that game; it is the closest away game to us.


What does 2012 have in store for us? I’m not really sure, but as I said earlier, hopefully it will be a bit less uneventful. Since both of us have gotten a little more settled into our jobs, we are going to try to do some more travelling. In addition to that, I am doing another session of curling; it starts in the middle of January. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I am going to attempt to do the weekly photo topic to help improve my photography skills. This week's theme is “the best of your 2011 photos,” I’ll have to go through my pictures and see which one I like best. If all goes as planned, Karen and I will pick up where the golf lessons ended last October and start trying to play some golf once the spring warm up comes. I am also hoping to make some more progress on the landscape in our yard. I still have a lot of ground to cover, I just need to get the CFO to authorize some funds for plants. Based on that quick list, it looks like 2012 could be a fun year.

As for the travelling, we’ve been in Illinois for over a year and really haven’t explored the surrounding areas. I would like to spend some more time wandering around Chicago and head down to St. Louis for a weekend. We have scheduled a trip to Denver this spring, Karen will be presenting at a conference and I will be tagging along to sight see. I have only been to Colorado once for a ski trip and I am looking forward to exploring Denver while Karen is busy at the conference.  I will try to cover the historical stuff that she doesn't like while she is at the conference. In May, I will make a trip into neighboring Indiana for my first Indy 500.  We are also talking about taking another cruise, who knows if that will actually happen or not. We had such a good time on the one we did over Thanksgiving 2011 that we are itching to do it again.


This looks like a lot of travelling and it doesn't include trips to visit family for the holidays. Hopefully this all works out and we have a great year. What do you all have planned for 2012?