Pulled It Off

Well now, that was a heck of a New Year's Eve.

Somehow managed to finish cleaning the house and getting nearly all the food cooked (and the kitchen straightened up) before the guests started showing up. The menu included English-style roast beef (a new recipe never before tried...got it from the Downton Abbey Christmas cookbook), my own butternut squash soup, oven-roasted Brussels sprouts, oven-roasted potato/sweet potato medley, oven-roasted vegetable medley (broc, cauliflower, and carrot), pasta carbonara (made by my son from scratch...yes, he makes his own pasta) and a pretty expansive charcuterie board put together by my wife after we found out (too late) that you needed a 48 hour notice to just order one. Everything got demolished despite one of the adults being a vegetarian, and two of them abstaining from dairy. I mean, that 5.5# roast? There's only a sliver of it left on the plate this morning...a sliver. And somehow we still have two six-packs of beer...oh, wait, because we killed four bottles of wine even before getting to the champaign.

Everyone managed to stay awake (even me...despite getting up at 7am and missing my afternoon nap), and the karaoke machine made an appearance circa 1am. Oh, boy. 

I slept till 11am.

My but the house is in need of some cleanup, today. Not much left for leftovers (except pasta...Diego went a bit overboard and we have a ton of extra drying on the counter). I'm not a big watcher of bowl games (especially now that they don't really mean anything to college football...or college football players/coaches), but I still think some relaxing on the couch is in order today (as he sips his freshly brewed pot of coffee at 12:04pm). Cleanup will happen...maybe even before I finish this post...but, yeah, I think I want to take it easy today. Maybe some Blood Bowl or a walk in the fresh air. After the rest of the family gets up, of course.

The last thing I'll mention about last night (before it slips my memory) is I once again had a chance to regale half-a-dozen adult humans with a 30-40 minute lecture on what Dungeons & Dragons is and the state of the hobby. Personal chef, physicist, patent attorney for Microsoft, Boeing engineer, contractors, political consultant...yeah, a bunch of successful professionals...all of them knew of the game, but none of them had ever played or had any experience with it, and they were just fascinated.  It's always odd to me how this thing I do can demand such positive attention...when, as a teen in the late 80s, early 90s the opposite was more often the case. Of course, I'm a lot more self-assured/confident these days (I made a roast beef for 14 people!), but I'm also more knowledgable. I know how to explain things in a way that is A) understandable, B) interesting/relatable, and C) inspiring (I think) to the listeners. When half the people say they want to give the game a try after I've delivered what amounts to a sermon on the history of the D&D hobby...well, I shake my head in amazement.

One of these days I'll get back to running for adults. It's nice that I can still draw. 

Okay, enough bragging; on to the New Year retrospective/resolution making!

Despite most of my local sports teams tanking their seasons...and a certain presidential election not going the way I would have hoped...2024 was damn sight better for me personally than 2023. I mean, no one close to me died, so that's a win, right? Some good coaching experiences (volleyball and soccer), won an adventure writing contest, penned an adventure for Cauldron 2024 (that got played by some 40-odd people), learned to cook a few new dishes (*ahem*), got to meet and share a beer with a couple of game blogging luminaries, travelled to both Europe and Mexico, reconnected with old friends, made some new friends, threw some parties, attended some parties, and got to run some high level D&D for my kids. Heck, I even got some blogging in...more than last year, anyway (though that was a pretty low bar...).

But I didn't write/publish any new books. Oh, I had some writing published IN a couple books, but they weren't my books...they were contributions to someone else's project. It's been a while since my last publication. Which is a bit of a bummer: I've had some time to write, I've had some ideas/things to write about...but I haven't put it all together. I've been undisciplined. And, jeez, you'd think at my age (51! I'm on the downward slope!), I'd be able to pull it together. Avoid the distractions from my purpose. 

Mm. Life is a challenge.

SO...looking back at my 2023 resolutions (the last time I posted such things...right before my life went off the rails a bit), I see that I hit on less than half the dozen or so I proposed. I think we'll try to keep this year's list a bit more modest:

Resolutions for 2025

• Sell my mother's house
• Write ONE book by the end of August
• Publish ONE book by the end of December
• Coach Sofia's soccer team to the playoffs (in October)
• Publish 100 blog posts (99 to go!)

There's more that I hope to accomplish this year: I am coaching Diego's last season of middle school volleyball this Spring, for example, and I'll be attending Cauldron 2025 in October and hope to make a good showing with my adventures-not-yet-penned. But these are the five things I really want to have done by December 31st; if I can look back to this post in one year and say I accomplished all of them? That will have been a spectacular triumph for Your Truly.

All right. That's enough for right now...time to get to that kitchen clean-up.

Best wishes to everyone...I hope nothing but the best for you and your loved ones this year; may you have health and happiness and may your sorrows be small and manageable.