December 31, 2005: New Year’s Eve

Oreo decided to be super snuggly boy after being neglected so much yesterday so we ended up staying in bed until near 11:00 am. When I did get up he immediately followed me into the office and went right back to sleep on his pillow. I have a busy day today and need to get crackin’ on getting the house cleaned. Dad leant me his carpet cleaner the other day so that I could use that. The carpeting is terrible in the house but we didn’t want to hire a professional carpet cleaner to come in just before the party so we are doing our own spot cleaning and then the plan is to have a real carpet cleaner come in afterwards and see what we can do to get the carpets back towards their original condition. Then maybe we will put down plastic runners or something because there are areas of the carpetting that just get such high traffic that nothing seems to help.

WordPress 2.0 released today. I am excited. WP is such awesome software. I am really looking forward to seeing all of the updates that they put into this new package. It will probably be a couple of weeks before I will have a chance to try it out.

By 11:00 we got our first weather based cancellation for the party. This is the problem with New Year’s Eve parties. The weather is always awful for us and lots of people are always travelling from some distance and it makes it really tough.

At 11:30 I had to run off to Wally World to get some supplies of which we have run out. I ended up having to hit Wegmans as well because Walmart doesn’t carry the carpet cleaning solution that I needed to pick up.

I started using Delicious today which is a neat idea. It will take a while before I learn how to make it useful probably. But I am sure that I can find some neat uses for it. Like maybe have an SGL link feed that you can subscribe to so that you can automatically get a feed of all of the cool sites that I send you to on a regular basis.

I found a really cool website called Opacity that is a collection of photographs of urban industrial ruins. There are some really amazing photographs on there.

Thanks to Ben (or MBen as he is known around here) for linking to the BBC’s List of 100 Things We Didn’t Know Last Year.

My big job for the day is cleaning. Carpet cleaning to be exact. Oreo and Mr. Humphries 🙁 have really taken a toll on our flooring over the past two years. It is a constant battle to keep our almost white carpets, well, almost white. It is a losing battle I am afraid.

My plan is to get tons of pictures and videos of the party tonight to put up on the site. If everything goes really well I might even manage to pull off a podcast from the party. That would be really cool.

Dominica spent the entire afternoon cooking and I spent the afternoon cleaning. It takes a lot of work to put a party together. Especially if you want the house to look nice. Oreo was freaking out all afternoon. He doesn’t like change very much and we were rearranging furniture and doing thing that we don’t normally do and he didn’t like it one bit. He kept running around the house trying to be with us but also trying to play or sleep or whatever.

At 7:00 we had just about everything done and the food was out and we started waiting for people to arrive. We had all ready had some cancellations some due to weather, some couldn’t get a babysitter, one got called into work because someone had been fired that day and some were sick. New Year’s is a tough time to attempt a party because it is so late at night, the past week has been so busy and the weather is often quite awful. And now we are at that age where almost everyone has small children which makes going anywhere a lot more difficult and unpredictable.

Andy and Miranda were the first people to arrive at the party around 8:45. That means that Dominica and I had sat around by ourselves for just about two hours. We hadn’t actually expected anyone until closer to 8:30 but we did have to be ready at 7:00 which caused us to feel a bit like losers sitting around waiting for people for almost two hours. There was a lot of food ready adn we were getting really worried that we wouldn’t have anyone show up to eat it. Andy had called earlier and said that they would be coming between 8:30 and 9:00 so we knew that someone was coming. Mary called at 7:00 and said that Jocelyn wasn’t feeling well and that they would be coming later after she had taken a nap.

Eric, Amanda and Julia arrived just minutes after Andy and Miranda did. They hadn’t been planning on coming to the party but we had called them and begged them to come over and help to eat all of the food that we had sitting around. The party was extrememly low key but that was what we were expecting. We did manage to have music this year. Dominica gave me a hard time about not having any so I work frantically to get some Ogg Vorbis files moved over onto the Mac Mini in the living room so that it could play some tunes while we were hanging out. That actually ended up working really well.

Nate, Mary and Jocelyn all arrived close to 10:00 which surprised us because we figured that no one else was coming by that point. So all together we ended up having ten people at the party which was roughly what we had been antipating this year. We knew that it was going to be a really small group this year. We had just about no time to plan or to make sure that everyone was invited and that everyone knew that we were definitely going to be having the party (although by now everyone should really just know.)

Everyone was gone by 1:00 and Dominica and I got the house cleaned up before going to bed. That is a good feeling to know that you don’t have to get up and deal with that in the morning. Oreo was exhausted from having been begging for food for several hours straight. He went right to bed the moment that everyone had left. It wasn’t long before we had gone to bed as well.

No luck getting a podcast out tonight. Hopefully I will get one out tomorrow. I do have a song picked out that I wanted to play and don’t want to miss the date.

Thanks to all of our readers here at SGL. This is the end of our sixth year of blogging and we hope to see you all in 2006. We look forward to a lot of new and exciting changes as SGL continues to grow and evolve.

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