Welcome 2024

Happy New Year to you, blogosphere! I’m so eager to begin this year with you. Where will it take us? Well, since we are a group who tends to share ourselves online and in public, I’m sure we will all find out eventually what 2024 has brought for each other.

Last night I stayed awake till midnight. I rarely do this, because my natural bedtime is around 9 pm and I simply can’t see the benefit of staying up till midnight. My old tradition used to be watching a live broadcast of Times Square, which is in a different time zone, and then going to bed after New York counted down. I’d be out cold by 9:30 pm. But this year, Pedro insisted. I mean, I can see where he could be coming from. This new year, he and I are beginning from a radical new place in our lives. It does feel momentous.

We kept ourselves awake by stuffing ourselves to the gills and drinking and watching movies. We bought a new charcuterie board as a housewarming gift to ourselves this Fall at a fair in Tigard. Last night it was time to use it for the first time.

Another tradition broken by Pedro last night was “where” we ate our food. One thing I really love about him is that it is important for us to eat all our meals at the dining table. Snacks, breakfast, and of course every dinner; his opinion is that it should be done while sitting down like a civilized human, at a place setting. His kids do this without hesitation. When we combined households, I adopted his habit, and had to unlearn my own habit of eating most frequently while sitting at my computer, or on the couch in front of the TV, or even hanging over the kitchen sink.

Last night, he grinned conspiratorially, and robbed a side table from the living room and discovered that it fit between the footrests of the theatre seats in the TV room.

I have been a little obsessed the past two months with finding my Lord of the Rings movies. I’m a huge fan, I read Tolkien’s books (well, “book,” it’s a single bound 1,500 page tome that I still own) of the trilogy the first time when I was around 14 or so. I’ve read it multiple times since. When the Peter Jackson movies came out, I didn’t just purchase the DVDs, I purchased the Extended Editions, with additional Appendices DVDs. Each boxed set contains over six hours of film plus “making of” documentary, and that’s for each of the three movies. Yes, 18 hours of Lord of the Rings sounds irresistible to me more often than it should. Sadly, I have yet to discover these boxed sets since we have moved. I am pretty sure I have looked in every single cardboard box in our storage sheds and the garage three or four times. I have spent hours digging into the bottoms of so many boxes, and yet I still cannot locate the movies. I am missing about 20 movies, so it seems like there must be a box somewhere that contains them. But no. I have looked and looked, but they are so far undiscoverable. It maddens me. We are traveling to New Zealand for two weeks in January of 2025 as a birthday present to myself. I’m trying to get ready for the trip by hyping myself up. But I CANNOT FIND the darn movies. I’ve had multiple temper tantrums in storage sheds lately.

In lieu of my own copies, I managed to find a version of the Extended Edition of The Two Towers last night. (We watched the Fellowship of the Ring, the first movie, last month) It’s a nice 3 hour, 45 minute mega-movie that we both enjoyed while gorging on food from the charcuterie trays.

People in the neighborhood had their booming explosives going from about 8 pm, and they continued until about 1 am. This is normal around here. (insert eyeroll) I imagine they are mostly fireworks, but our area is fairly treed, so we saw nothing, just heard the booms, like a war zone, on every side. Humans are fascinating. Why explosives? Why is this the way we celebrate?

I read my friend Bonnie’s post this morning. In her blog In Search of the Very, she suggested answering questions posed by Proust. I like the questions. It gave me an idea to answer them in private, in a journal for myself. With the blog, while it helps me write when I wouldn’t otherwise write, I have lost two big things. They are 1) the skill of handwriting, which I used to excel at , and 2) the opportunity to be brutally honest with myself about absolutely any topic that comes to mind. I’m usually very honest and open with you all, but every now and then I leave out my thoughts because I am not ready to make it public, or because I don’t feel that you are served by seeing it.

I am hoping to move through the list, one question at a time, and answer each in exhaustive detail for myself. On Bonnie’s page, she said Proust said that answers to these questions will establish a person’s true nature. I’m seeking authenticity.

Did you catch the beautiful message from my kid on the Christmas letter I posted? If you hit that link, then scroll to the bottom, you’ll see that Kellen wrote about appreciating life, loved ones, pets, and safety. Simple. Perfect. I wrote a four page Christmas letter and had not considered these things and the realization was a smack. The name of my blog is “conscious engagement” intentionally. It’s because that’s who I want to be, and what I want to talk about. I like the idea of journaling for myself. I’m eager to see where my words and thoughts take me. I’m certain that I’ll share some of it with you in the coming year.

Much love to you! Yes, I really do mean YOU. I hope we each find some excellent reasons to smile in the coming year.