Happy New Year! Welcome to my first entry for my new Weblog! I decided that one of my "resolutions" for this new year should be to keep in better touch with family and friends, so this "blog" is going to be my attempt at doing so. Check back periodically to find my latest posts, if you like. Most of what I write may only be interesting to my Mom (and maybe not even her), so I don't expect that this blog will be well-read. But, it'll give me a place to vent a little bit, and hopefully some of you will be curious enough about the latest goings-on in my life to drop by every so often. (Believe it or not, I already have a "work" blog, which you can find at http://www.ejball.com/EdAtWork/. That one is really unlikely to be of interest to many of my family and friends, but you're free to check it out if you like.)

Anyway, today was an exciting day -- we woke up to a few good inches of snow on the ground! We won't be leaving the house any time soon -- our vehicles aren't "winterized" by any stretch of the imagination -- but we had a great time in the snow this morning. Sarah and I had a particularly good time, finally having an opportunity to use the plastic sled we bought a year or two back. Inner tubes work best up in the mountains where there's plenty of puffy snow, but hard plastic was great for speeding down our street, which is a pretty decent hill (as a poor teenage girl found out when she tried to drive up it -- she didn't make it up, and had to turn around).

The wildest part about the morning was actually meeting and talking with a few of my neighbors! That's right, real, live, next-door neighbors! Now what were their names again? Sarah and I mostly hung out with Joe and his daughter Kiara; the two girls sped down the hill many times on the sled, with Joe and I running beside, trying to keep up, mostly to keep them away from parked cars and mailbox posts! We largely succeeded, and there were thankfully no injuries. Anyway, this was the first time we've experienced what it's like to really play in the snow at home, so we had a great time. The snow is too soft for an easy snowman for the moment, but maybe we'll figure something out before it all melts...

(One other thing -- the trouble with a Weblog for “keeping in touch” is that it can be a bit one-way. The Comments link below is a great way to keep the lines of communication two-way; if you read this and have anything at all to say in response, even just “Great to hear from you, Ed!”, please click on the link and leave me a note. Thanks!)