Happy New Year!

Spencer and I are starting off 2011 with lovely sunny cold weather in Seattle. It was 24 yesterday morning and 27 this morning, but it's really dry out there, so everyone can still go out and drive around safely, which is really nice. We won't be going anywhere today, however, because we both are sick. Spencer got the Christmas cold and it's hitting him harder than normal and everyone else. It seems to be bringing back his dengue fever symptoms and is making him hurt a lot. The mechanism of this is unknown to us, but maybe his body was fighting the dengue and reduced the pain, and can't now that there's this other problem to deal with. His echocardiogram showed no heart tissue damage earlier this week, so that also makes it hard to know what's up with this pain. I was good all week but the cold caught up with me last night. So far I'm having a much more mild reaction than Spencer, but I'm still early on in it so we'll see.

Despite our illnesses, we still went out for brief New Year's festivities last night. We walked up the hill to the roundabout, because you can see the space needle really well from there. They did a fireworks show off the space needle that was 8 minutes long (everyone kept talking about how it would be 8 minutes long). There were a couple dozen people up there, and a bunch of kids with horns, and it was a festive scene. The fireworks were cool too. They were shot off the top of the space needles as well as from the legs. Max is so deaf that he couldn't hear any of the fireworks around, which was good, and none of the neighbors let any off near our house. Additionally, he went to bed and was sleeping, so Spencer and I were able to sneak out of the house to go see the fireworks without him knowing, then sneak back IN without him knowing we were ever gone! That was pretty funny.

Yesterday I got some more boxes unpacked and our kitchen somewhat organized. It feels much more like a normal working kitchen now. We have to store lots of things in the basement (particularly large-sized occasional-use kitchen things), but that's how it goes for us at this house. Getting a few boxes unpacked made a lot more open space in the living and dining rooms. We were starting to have problems with Max because he would bump his butt into things, then that would scare him, and in his fright he would lose his footing on the wood floors and slide around in a short panic. So we needed to make more space for him to move his butt around, and now he can.

Happy new year to everyone. I hope the new year has less stress for us than the last few months, and if that's also the case for you, then I hope the same for you as well. Cheers.