Feeling pretty dreary here in January.  The weather is warm with rain sometimes.  The snow is reduced to ice with meltwater on top.  Makes it so hard to go outdoors and walk anywhere, even though the weather is so mild.  i'ts been about 3 weeks like this with no end in sight.  The pineapple express has settled on the lower peninsula to stay.  High pressure & cold air where are you????  Snow would be nice too to cover the bare plants.

Last week we watched the film Julie & Julia where a young woman starts a blog about her commitment to cook every recipe in Julia Child's book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking.   I decided to do a similar thing with my new serger, a most complicated machine that will take me months to learn how to use.  Maybe years.  Hence the blog "serger virgin."   I just hope I don't spend more time blogging than learning how to operate my serger.

Today is an appropriate time to start a blog, being the first day of the new year. Or continue a blog, considering that I now see I started this blog 2 full years ago after our Italy trip. There have been no big vacations since then, and I don't foresee any in the foreseeable future either. So the blog will continue as a (probably) boring account of what the bleep I am doing these days.

First of all, I want to know where the last 10 years went? It seems only last week that everyone was stressed out anticipating some unknown terrible fallout upon entrance into the new millennium. The fears were focused on computers' supposed inability to handle a 4-digit year beginning with a 2, after always using a 2 digits shorthand to express a year. Nothing happened, and time marched on. For 10 years.

When I was much younger, I counted ahead to figure out how old I would be in "the year 2000." Probably everyone else did too. I wondered if I would live that long. Well I did live that long and now another 10 years to boot.

So what are the changes over the last 10 years?

In the world at large:

TV went to hell

Air travel went to hell

Electronic communication exploded

Google makes it possible to find any possible thing you want to know

In my life:

I am retired.

I became a grandmother

We did LOTS of travelling, which ended by January 2008

We left Alaska & moved to Washington. Then we moved back to Alaska

(At least I figured out where I want to be and I'm lucky to have my wish)