Happy New Year!

I've been buried under a pile of recipes and have emerged alive, 28 recipes later. I will add more as time goes by, but this will give me a good start. Plus, there will be a break during the move, so I won't need 52. And as a bonus, a friend of mine, who is a vegetarian, offered to have me over to her house and us cook together! She'll pull out one of her cookbooks, we'll pick a recipe and cook up a double batch. I'm so curious to see what's in her pantry and fridge (shhh, don't tell her!).

In the midst of my recipe quest, I've visited quite a few food blogs. It's quite amazing how many people out there document photographically every bite of food they take. I think that's an awful lot of work and time. The blog I linked on the side, Kath Eats Real Food, is one such blog. But it's really interesting to see just what a trim, fit person eats regularly.

I've also done a lot of tossing. Throwing away, finally letting go of some junk, and finally sorting through some piles of stuff. It's all in the quest to prepare for the move. So I"ve got a good start on my new years resolutions.

I have also just enrolled my boys in twice a week basketball. It's free and at the local community park. Not a competitive thing. Mostly learning skills and rules and such. I'm also hoping to enroll myself in the Thai cooking class. I talked about this last year. This is my last chance to take this class. Ironically, Gary will be in Thailand during the first class. So I need to line up a babysitter for a few hours.

New Years Eve. It's always a spectacle here in Hawaii. This year was no exception. We have some neighbors a few houses in front of us (we live at the top of a T intersection), who go crazy with the fireworks. We had bought a large package and some special individual fireworks. When we had run through ours, and had cleaned up our mess, the neighbors came over bearing a big load of fireworks. He said they had 3 truckfulls, so we could get more if we wanted. He gave us about 5 packages of the strung together firecrackers (you may not have them where you are - they are quite popular here and LOUD!), a big box of the poppers that you throw on the ground that are fun for the little kids, and about 3 big packs of big fountains and other stuff. I don't know where he got them from, and I wasn't going to ask! It took another hour to light all he gave us. A lot of pickup trucks and cars kept coming to his house. He had iced down drinks in a cooler. At midnight I dragged Gary out to listen to it and watch the neighbors instead of watching the ball drop on tv. This is a tradition in Hawaii. I'm actually going to miss being smoked out of my house! It rained off and on, so I didn't hear any firetrucks. We were laying in bed at 12:40 and it was still going on and then the wind kicked up and the rain poured and silence reigned.

This is the view from our front door looking towards our neighbors house at midnight. It's the firework finale, I guess they just made a big bonfire and threw everything in - at least that's what it seemed like! I was a little scared there because the fire got so big and it was in the middle of the street. But I guess there weren't any cars nearby. The fireworks were going off like crazy, but it wasn't any louder than anyone else across the island. You could hear loud, deep booms and see the sky flash from way far away, not to mention all the noise from our side of the island and our town! I'm sure O'bama was reliving his youth, remembering the craziness.