Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Happy New Year!



Happy New Year! I don’t do much in the way of resolutions anymore, but I would like to try attending to my blog more often. We’ll see how that goes!

Reflecting back on 2007, it was a very good year in the Grammar household. Everyone stayed reasonably healthy, happy and gainfully occupied. RH retired in April, one of the year’s banner events, but has remained gainfully occupied ever since doing all kinds of helpful household tasks and regularly bringing me tea as I’m working in my office. I’ve quite taken to having him around, as I knew I would.

Another banner event of 2007 was VCCGirl commencing her college education. She completed her first semester with a B+ average, so we’re very proud, especially as she accomplished this while simultaneously keeping up two part-time jobs. With that work ethic, we foresee great things ahead for number 1 daughter.

The Lad spent 2007 working very hard at building his career in the music recording and producing business, with very long hours in his studio and lots of networking. He was rewarded with major involvement in a terrific Christmas album by an up-and-coming Il Divo-type group called Insieme. (Look for them!) It’s a little hard for him to watch his sister flit around in her Fit while he buses everywhere he needs to go (especially with a girlfriend in a different municipality), but he is saving every penny he can towards buying into a condo, and we’re proud of his focus and thrift. Number 1 son is growing up!

As for me, it was pretty much same old-same old. I hugely enjoyed two cruise vacations this year, which is all it takes to makes me happy. RH and I had a warm and wonderful time in the Caribbean last January and joined our favourite traveling companions, the Lawman and Ms. K, for an extended trip between New York and Quebec in October.

Looking towards 2008, I expect a few big things to happen. One of them already has: RH is no longer quite so R. After almost nine months of full-time retirement, he has now signed a one-year contract of a type known as an as and when with his old employer. He will be heading in for his first “back to work” day tomorrow, when he expects to begin hashing out the as, when, where, what, how and why of his new part-time work. The idea at this point is that he will go in a couple of days a week, primarily for mentoring/teaching type work, but also whatever other little things need doing around the office that no one else has time to do.

Every office would love to have a do-all-the-crap-stuff worker, right? I did exactly that one summer while I was in university, and while the things I was tasked to do were boring and repetitive, I performed them with reasonably good cheer and was extremely popular with my crap-stuff-free coworkers!

We also expect our son to fly the nest in 2008, as construction of his condo is due to be completed this summer. Although we hardly see him as it is now, this will still be a wrenching, milestone event that will probably make me cry. But of course this is what I have spent the past 22 years working towards: my child being ready and able to become independent. They will be proud tears.

The last big event we are really, really hoping happens in 2008 is that we will be moving into a new house at last! After about 15 months of frustrating and fruitless searching, we are going to start this year off with a new realtor and, I hope, a fresh perspective.

And there will be cruises…


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