Here there be dragons...

"I'm telling you stories. Trust me." - Winterson

Happy New Year

Holidays were good.  Relaxing and exhausting at the same time :)    Christmas Eve was at Barb and Carl's -- a really nice evening.  Then back to Paris for the night.  Both Chris and I were up early on Christmas morn so we did our Christmas first before going to my parents' for breakfast and family gift exchange.  We haven't done the family breakfast thing before -- quite enjoyed that :)   Then it was to Chris' family for dinner, with several people I haven't seen since the wedding so that was nice. Gifts were exchanged and people were happy.   The Elsa doll we got C's niece seemed to be the hit of the night, so that was fun :)  

Boxing Day we inherited Bailey -- Mum and Dad were off to Florida, so we got to puppy sit for the week.  Sasha was pretty thrilled with that whole idea :)   That evening was a 40th bday party for a friend of C's so we went there for the evening.

As to New Year's Eve -- we had an early dinner at Chris' parents before a relaxing evening of nothingness.  We finished it off by going to see Star Wars -- when we left the theater, it was a new year :)  

Overall vacation productiveness -- I managed to get some cleaning and organizing done :)   More importantly, I finally got my wedding photos printed!  Woohoo!!!  :)   hahaha it's the little things in life.

I also got my 2014 blog posts printed in book form.  Pretty stoked about that.  I had previously used Blog2Print, but something changed in either their software or in Bloggers that was making it so all the pictures were misaligned :(   Reaching out to them they informed me there was no way of fixing it.   Fail.  Such began a long search for options.   I found several that would print from the blog, but none that would include photos.   Then I found a few that would include photos, but the layout was all photos on the side of the page, disconnected from the text, and I was not happy with that at all.  One looked promising, but only had the option of printing the *whole* blog, whereas I really just the want the last year.  But then recently I found BlogBooker which will take the blog and publish it to either PDF or Word.  It allows setting the date range, and pictures are included as they are -- exactly what I was looking for.  For a donation, it'll include high res photos.   I could just replace them as I have all the originals, but tbh, I appreciated the software enough I deemed it worth the donation.   Anyways, the PDF was of no use to me, but the Word doc allowed me to fix the layout so I could then publish through any of the multiple self-publishing options.  In this case, I chose LuLu -- and the book I got, I'm very happy with.  It was also a super-reasonable price (esp compared to what I was used to paying for my earlier books).  So I'm downloading 2015 as I type this :)   It was a pretty incredible year; I'd like to have it in book form.  2014 was the shortest blog-book I've had yet.  A significant amount of it was dedicated to wedding planning :)   No surprise there!  2015 has more than twice the number of posts, and I'm hoping 2016 will get back up there too.

While any of you who've read this blog for any amount of time will know I'm not one for New Year's Resolutions -- let's be honest, when I want to change something, I do it.  I'm hardly one to wait around for a new year ;)   But the timing with printing blogs annually did make a pretty solid point about the writing -- I'm sad that I didn't write any flash last year :(   And I find that without the horses, I don't have a steady stream of writing inspiration for reality.  Combine that with a distinct lack of time and I'm left with much thinner blog books than I used to have.  Booo.  A quick scan of 2015 had posts in Feb: wedding and trip -- just the thought makes me smile.   Posts due to the eye surgeries (boo) and posts due to P90X3.   Curious to see what 2016's adventures will be.

As for said P90X3 - Decelerator.  Holy frig.  It contains the third exercise I simply don't have a hope of being able to do (the first being the crow, and the second the standing splits).  This is in push-up position, one knee comes up and balances on the upper arm, and the other leg randomly levitates out.  Yeah no.  Just no.   I can just barely do the modified version (in pushup position, bringing one knee to elbow without the other leg levitating...)  And the rest of it is questionable -- modified pull-ups, when I can barely do regular ones.  Sheesh.  Oh, and all in slow motion of course.

Happy New Year to all :)

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