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New Year's Day -- 01/01/12 |
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Nancy's mother and Tom and Janet and their son Mike and daughter Allison came over for a New Year's Eve dinner. (Jeremy visited long enough to overlap with them for a few minutes, but he had to leave because of a New Year's Eve party he was hosting at his place.) So we ate (I had made some lasagna with ground turkey and sliced zucchini and also a pan of eggplant parm) and sat around talking and had a very pleasant visit. After they left, Nancy and I sat by the fire and watched The Help -- which finished a few minutes before midnight. My brother phoned a minute or two after midnight to wish us a happy new year, and I think I turned our lights out by ten minutes past midnight. Oh what a wild and wanton New Year's Eve. I got up around seven in the morning, came downstairs for coffee, wandered about the Internet for a while, and then decided to go for a walk. It was just about at freezing and there had been some light rain yesterday and last night. (Took this picture while walking -- this is my street but it's a couple of blocks from our house, after the street makes a right turn.) Where the sun had touched the road, everything was fine, but small areas of black ice hid in the shadows. About five minutes after taking this, I came to a very shaded area and almost slipped and fell. Walked about a mile, but not that briskly because of the slippery spots -- about 17 minutes.
A bit past noon, Nancy suggested that we go over to Markos Kabob & More (in Narragansett) and enjoy their Sunday buffet for lunch and then take a walk along the sea wall... and so we did.
By then the bright sunshine had warmed the day up into the mid to upper 40s. The above picture is looking south along Ocean Road... and the picture below looking straight out across the entry to Narragansett Bay (a straight line along this point of view would cover about 40 miles of water and then bump into Martha's Vineyard).
Walking up Ocean Road, we eventually came to the Narragansett Towers...
And, continuing past the towers and curving around toward the beach... This is a view of Narragansett Town Beach. No, I decided to skip the noontime Pier Plunge (see 2008 entry) into the bracingly cool waters of Narragansett Bay. (Although I admit that given the mild temperature and the lack of strong winds, this would have been a good year for it.) My excuse is that I will probably join Jeremy in that February plunge. (If you look at the picture below, the exact spot for the Pier Plunge is by those buildings about two-thirds of the way along the shore, going from left to right.)
We walked a couple blocks short to two miles. Came home, had coffee and cake, took down the outside Christmas lights, wrote this, and now I need to help Nancy take down the Christmas tree and then get it a workout before fixing dinner.. Hope you all had a good start to the new year... Who am I? I am a 68 year old computer geek who lives in Rhode Island with my wife, Nancy. She used to be a computer person as well (we got our MS degrees in Systems Sciences together) but she has since escaped from computers to become a middle school math teacher (and, this year, has moved from teaching math to teaching science). Eldest child lives in New York City with his wife and their two boys. Daughter is currently in Ottawa with her boy friend. Youngest is a restaurant manager here in R.I. The nest is empty. I work for a big computer company (you definitely know their initials) in their education and training department. I used to write courses and teach courses for them but a few years ago I got involved in helping to set up a quality assurance group and now I work from home doing editing and quality assurance checking on courses written by others.Hobbies & interests include photography (and video), running, reading, gardening, cooking, drawing, writing, and politics as a spectator sport. (No wonder I never seem to have free time.) And I've been babbling here on a semi-regular basis for more than fifteen years.
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