Seventh day of Christmas / New Year's Eve
Dec. 31st, 2005 09:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustYou go for months without a party, and then two come along in a matter of days. One we missed because we didn't want to take the car out in the snow; tonight the thaw has set in, and my sore throat has become a cold. I could demand pity for staying home on New Year's Eve, but the truth is that we have just had dinner with a glass of wine in front of The African Queen on television, and soon I will go to bed with my book of ghost stories, and I don't think I'm missing much. Time to say goodbye to 2005...
Let's keep a sense of proportion about this. I don't post much about what's going on in the world; what can I say that you haven't heard already? But it is noted that 2005 has been a year of disaster, upheaval and general bad news: wars drag on, new diseases appear and old ones fail to vanish, the sea reclaims the land. My life is small and cosy, and I know how lucky that makes me.
2005 was, nevertheless, the year of five funerals and two weddings - and while the number of funerals is partly just a sign of our age (our parents, our friends' parents) it's also partly not that, just bad things happening, as they do.
At work, it's been the year where the business really has grown to fill the space available: enough new clients to keep us busy thinking of new ways to design and build their sites, enough existing clients wanting changes and re-designs to challenge us to think of fresh ways to look at familiar material, and enough people trusting us to keep their sites running day to day that there's always something to get on with. All of which is good.
2005 was the year we finally went to Angoulême for the comics fesival, after talking about it for years; and enjoyed it enough that we plan to return in 2006.
We also reached the end of the pilgrim route - not Compostella, but the Pyrenees. This is as far as the French long-distance footpath will take us, and if we decide to follow the route further, it will be some other way. It wasn't as triumphant a conclusion as it might have been, as I had to accept that I couldn't handle the distances and the heat. All in all, we haven't walked as much as I would have like too, this year - too many days when the weather was uninviting, or we were just too busy.
It was the year I gave in to temptation and started this LJ - and though I knew that I wouldn't be satisfied with using it to follow the travels of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kelpercomehome, and that once I signed up I would start posting, I didn't foresee how much I would enjoy it, and how much it would occupy my mind. It's the source of two pleasures, the writing itself and - for all that the term "friends" as used on LJ is misleading - the friends I've made, the people I enjoy reading (some of whom, amazingly, read me!).
Like every year, it's been full of friends and visits and places and books. Two odd changes - shifts in emphasis, rather than events. One is that we've been going to Newcastle less often than we used, and more often south to Hartlepool and Middlesbrough (still not very often, but these were places we never went from one year's end to the next, and now, it seems, we do). The other is that the death of our video recorder and its replacement with a hard disk / DVD system has made television much more attractive: The African Queen, which we time-shifted, is the example that made me think about this, but Doctor Who may have had something to do with it, too. Truly, we are living in the twenty-first century...
So it's onwards into the future: good night, sleep well, and a happy new year to us all!
Let's keep a sense of proportion about this. I don't post much about what's going on in the world; what can I say that you haven't heard already? But it is noted that 2005 has been a year of disaster, upheaval and general bad news: wars drag on, new diseases appear and old ones fail to vanish, the sea reclaims the land. My life is small and cosy, and I know how lucky that makes me.
2005 was, nevertheless, the year of five funerals and two weddings - and while the number of funerals is partly just a sign of our age (our parents, our friends' parents) it's also partly not that, just bad things happening, as they do.
At work, it's been the year where the business really has grown to fill the space available: enough new clients to keep us busy thinking of new ways to design and build their sites, enough existing clients wanting changes and re-designs to challenge us to think of fresh ways to look at familiar material, and enough people trusting us to keep their sites running day to day that there's always something to get on with. All of which is good.
2005 was the year we finally went to Angoulême for the comics fesival, after talking about it for years; and enjoyed it enough that we plan to return in 2006.
We also reached the end of the pilgrim route - not Compostella, but the Pyrenees. This is as far as the French long-distance footpath will take us, and if we decide to follow the route further, it will be some other way. It wasn't as triumphant a conclusion as it might have been, as I had to accept that I couldn't handle the distances and the heat. All in all, we haven't walked as much as I would have like too, this year - too many days when the weather was uninviting, or we were just too busy.
It was the year I gave in to temptation and started this LJ - and though I knew that I wouldn't be satisfied with using it to follow the travels of
kelpercomehome, and that once I signed up I would start posting, I didn't foresee how much I would enjoy it, and how much it would occupy my mind. It's the source of two pleasures, the writing itself and - for all that the term "friends" as used on LJ is misleading - the friends I've made, the people I enjoy reading (some of whom, amazingly, read me!).Like every year, it's been full of friends and visits and places and books. Two odd changes - shifts in emphasis, rather than events. One is that we've been going to Newcastle less often than we used, and more often south to Hartlepool and Middlesbrough (still not very often, but these were places we never went from one year's end to the next, and now, it seems, we do). The other is that the death of our video recorder and its replacement with a hard disk / DVD system has made television much more attractive: The African Queen, which we time-shifted, is the example that made me think about this, but Doctor Who may have had something to do with it, too. Truly, we are living in the twenty-first century...
So it's onwards into the future: good night, sleep well, and a happy new year to us all!
