Tuesday, January 01, 2008

Special Report - Happy Holidays!

When home for the holidays, I got plenty of comments from the myriad of relatives that I saw that my blog has become lame because I never update it - my bad! This is a somewhat true statement and I have no excuse really. Sure, the Bronx isn't exactly the kind of environment that influences my creativity or makes me the envy of my loyal readers, but there is plenty of time for me to sit and think up here, especially since there is nothing to do except ride a half-hour to the city or go to the gym. But, I made the choice to live up here for a reason, I just gotta do what I can to continue motivating myself I guess!!

But the new year has come. Maybe it's time for me to turn the proverbial leaf and try to write more. We'll see what happens!

After today, the holidays are officially over. My holidays were a good way to end a year that has touched both highs and lows, from my introduction to a special person in my life to the introduction of difficult health circumstances that I will have to deal with in the coming year. But I suppose that this is life and it is what everyone has to appreciate or deal with.

I spent the Christmas season in California getting a chance to visit many of my relatives, some for the first time. We had a good four days of Christmas this year, with fantastic food on Saturday at my grandparent's house, a Christmas tradition at my grandma's house next door with all of the relatives from my dad's side of the family, a Christmas-eve traditional crab feast at my house, and then a Christmas traditional leg o' lamb meal at my house. It was fairly quiet around my house this year since it was just my family who was around, but that's not a bad thing. My dad and I got to do a grueling two-hour hike up in the hills around my house, my mom and sister and I got to do some "shopping", and my remaining Los Gatos friend and I got to do some nerdy server and web photo album setup (stay tuned for details on that!).

Unfortunately, I had to miss out on my sister's 21st birthday bash because of my work schedule, but the lack of anyone around the office gave me time to finish up paperwork and also to prepare for the upcoming trip to Peru at the end of February for myself and my parents, with whom Erika and I will travel to the wonderfully historic and cultural capital city of the Inca's, Cusco. With this paperwork completed, hopefully Erika can be with me next year at this time and get to meet everyone!

For New Year's, I joined in on the annual traditional pub crawl, this year starting in Little Italy and wondering up into the East Village. We started at the Australian establishment Eight Mile Creek before stops at the dive Tom & Jerry's, DBA, Three of Cups (where we celebrated the New Year) , and the pinnacle of the evening, The Bourgeois Pig. This is a place that I had always wanted to visit but never actually made it to, so the fact that we happened to come across it on our pub crawl made it especially nice. We sat at the aristocrat location of the place and drank our drinks in awesome little metal goblets and ordered a Bailey's chocolate fondue that came with an assortment of fruits to dip. It was definitely the high spot of the evening and capped a wonderful holiday season!

J. Riley, Good Luck to all in the new year!

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