A Week in Review

Hello All! It's the first 2009 edition of "A Week in Review". Now that this feature has turned the page of a new year, is it old enough to be called a classic? I think so.

Strange
Think back with me to Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Doesn't it seem like months ago now? It was just last week! So weird. Christmas is unique in that once it's over, it is over. And after just a few days, it feels like weeks have passed. I don't know why, but it's true.

Project and Resolution
The day after Christmas, I was home from work and did some cleaning projects, one of them being sorting through my cedar chest. The chest was my grandmothers. Grandpa gave it to her a year or two before they were married in 1929. When she died, I inherited it, and I love it. Over the last few years I've been chucking all kinds of stuff in there. Things I've gotten at work or in the mail that I thought I should keep but wasn't sure what to do with, everything from letters and birthday cards to new information on my benefits packages at work. It all went into the cedar chest. When I opened it up last week I found a big pile of papers. What a mess. I started taking things out, one by one, and decided that half of all that junk could be thrown away. If I hadn't looked at it since 1999, I probably didn’t need it - into the garbage bag it went.

I saved the important things - birthday cards from friends and family, letters from my parents, and lots and lots of pictures. While doing this, I decided on a New Year's resolution, one that will be fun rather than torturous. I have years worth of photographs neatly stored that need to be put into albums. So this year, one album at a time, I am going to get those pictures into books. In fact, I found an album that I'd bought some time ago stored in my cedar chest, and put half of my Paris pictures in it. I don't do scrapbooking (weird that that word became a verb), so this won't be an elaborate project. I like a simple page with pictures and labels. Labeling will be the hard part. I'm not going to remember the dates of a lot of the events in these pictures, but I will do what I can. It'll be fun.

Happy New Year
I spent New Year’s Eve with Marla and her family. We ate pizza and watched movies and played Monopoly and did not get drunk. There were children in the house. Jonah had never played Monopoly before, so he and I worked as a team. He did really well with understanding the game – better than I’d expected him to. All of the boys had an evil grin and an even more evil laugh when someone landed on their property and owed them money. Cruel landlords. Josh won the game by quite a lot of money, and was giddy about it. He couldn’t stop laughing. Having thousands of dollars to wave in the faces of your broke brothers is fun, even when it’s fake money.

South Jordan did fireworks at midnight, and we could see them well out of their dining room window. We turned off all of the lights and sat on the floor. Even William, who had been sleeping, woke up and joined us. There’s something very beautiful about seeing Marla with her boys. She had the baby on her lap, and the other three sitting around her and the feeling was sweet and peaceful. The beauty of motherhood, maybe. She’s very good with her boys. I was happy to be there.

She and I met up again on New Year’s Day for lunch at the Olive Garden. I’ve heard some people talk trash about the Olive Garden because it’s a chain restaurant and not authentic Italian, blah blah blah, and to those people I’d like to say shut up. I don’t care about the lack of prestige, that lasagna was delicious.

Afterward, I went to Target for some necessities, and also bought myself a new nightstand for my bedroom. Mom and Dad sent me some money for Christmas, and I decided on a piece of furniture. It’s Target furniture, so obviously nothing too fancy, but I really do like it. I had to assemble the pieces myself, which I did with limited cussing, and now it’s next to my bed with a lamp, clock and book on it. Last evening I smiled every time I walked into my room and saw it sitting there. Would you like to see my new table? I’ll take a picture and post it next week.

Gilead
I started a new book and am in love with it, “Gilead” by Marilyne Robinson. I picked it up on a recommendation from my friend Nicole. Wow, was she right. It’s a great book, beautifully written. It’s about an older man, a preacher, who is dying, so he decides to write out different stories from his life for his young son. His experience is full of little moments that touched his mind or heart, and reading it makes me think about the little things in my own life that are wonderful. The whole story shows how beautiful the world and our lives are, but does it without being sappy or too sentimental. On almost every page I read something that I want to share, either here or take it to my family and read it out loud to someone. Really, I think any of you would love this book.

That’s it for now. I read a good quote from Oscar Wilde, who honestly has a lot of good quotes: "Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account." Maybe I’m not quite sure what that means, but I do know that I’ve bought a lot of stuff on credit, so this resolution thing shouldn’t be too hard.

Thanks, as always, for living with me in the blogosphere.
You are loved.