Happy 2011!

Happy New Year!  How did you ring in 2011?  I hate to keep saying that I'm sick but I still am so that took a toll on our New Year's Eve activities somewhat.  All week I just kept saying that I just hope I'm better so I can enjoy a nice New Year's Eve at home with my honeybear.  And Friday was the best day I've had in a week, however I was far from being 100%.

I had to work during the day but M had the day off so he went grocery shopping for some food for the night.  M rarely shops for both of us and I left it completely up to him to get what he wanted and everything he picked out was perfect to celebrate.  He bought a bunch of appetizer-type foods and we just cooked and ate them as we felt hungry throughout the night.

Our evening started around 6:30 pm when we started to clean up the house, especially the disaster of a kitchen we had.  Because I was sick all week and did nothing, all the baking and food prep I did for Christmas still had it's presence in the form of massive amounts of dirty dishes.  After about an hour and a half in the kitchen, it looked great. M tidied up the living room and back room and helped me with the kitchen too.  All while we were cleaning, we were listening to music, a playlist that M made for us.

The playlist M made for us to listen to that night consisted of about 135 songs, all of which we downloaded in 2010.  We are music freaks so downloading at least 1200 songs a year is commonplace.  M prepares a playlist each month of roughly 100 songs and we listen to it collectively and individually for the whole month before moving onto the next month's round of music.  So M took our favorite 10 or so songs from each month, which at times was a daunting task and made a best of 2010 playlist that we listened to non-stop from 6:30 pm to almost 2 am.  I was hoping to just stay up until midnight so I was happy that we were able to finish it from beginning to end and reminisce about the songs he choose.  Many times our memories take us to a certain place in time when we have the most distinct memory of a certain song, whether it be on our Florida trip last January/February, in Duluth in June for the MS150 or just a specific place on the St. Croix river we remember being at when we heard that song.

While we listened, we ate, talked, laughed, cried (ok, I did), drank orange juice, split a Miller Lite, watched Dick Clark's Rockin' NYE with the sound off and rang in 2011 germ-free style with a fist bump and a hug.

2010 in review was a good year in some aspects and not-so-good in others.  The good was that we attended multiple weddings for our families, celebrated life with a new nephew that was born in addition to three more second cousins, no deaths in our families, went to Florida on vacation, started a new position at work, having a wonderful partner and being healthy enough to enjoy life in general.  The bad was being too busy to fit in our annual canoe trip, the Vikings, cancelling our annual Vikings road game to Boston, and some private matters M and I and some of our family members have had to deal with since September and will be dealing with heavily in 2011.

I was going to list some resolutions within this post but I feel like I want to do it in a separate writing so that will be soon.

I hope you all had a fantastic New Year's Eve celebration and started 2011 on the right foot.