New Year's Day

 

   Anyone who has been reading this column know that yesterday and today are my favourite holidays. Having the clean slate of a new year in front of me is my favourite thing to celebrate. The added benefit of a day to eat junk food without guilt is an added bonus. 

   I like looking ahead too. I don't make any new year resolutions. I do think of some things that I'd like to do this year and plan for how to get them done. C and I try to set a few goals as a couple like doing certain house projects, cleaning up our diets or managing our finances differently. 

   2023 brought a few changes to our lives. The biggest was losing Scamp in May. For the first time in nearly 30 years. I did not have a cat to take care of. I had completely underestimated how devastated I was. So much of my time had been spent caring for Scamp especially as he got older. I felt very lonely and bereft when he was gone. In July we had an opportunity to help someone out by babysitting a young kitten. It made me so happy to have a kitten in the house, even though I knew she was just visiting. I was caught off guard when Willow's owner asked us if we wanted to keep her. She has been a joy in out lives and helped to heal our hearts. (Although we will always miss our beloved Scamp as we miss Colby, Ary and Nim our other cats.) We decided to replace our stinking mess of a downstairs carpet with an eye toward making the downstairs a usable family room. We selected a vinyl flooring that looks like wood and is very easy to keep clean. The bonus is that it improved the acoustics of the basement, making it a good spot for C to practice. When we came back from Door County, we adopted Barnaby, who has become a good friend to Willow.  We love to watch them play and interact with each other.

   We were finally forced to get a new garage door as we were having a lot of trouble getting the old one to open and close. Also various rodents had chewed a hole into one side of the door. We had planned to get rid of it as it doesn't match the siding we had put on last year. One of our plans for this year is to repaint the front door so that it matches the house and also paint the trim.

   Painting is something we plan to do a lot of this year. We want to paint the downstairs family room, the guest bathroom, the kitchen, the living and dining rooms and our bedroom. We hadn't painted anything when we moved in so it really is time to freshen things up a bit. The guest bathroom is brown and has no windows. We are hoping a lighter coloured paint will make the room seem less cave like. We also plan to paint our bedroom a nice warm shade of blue that will be more soothing than the yellow it is now.

   I want to do more writing this year, more practicing my instruments and more reading. lately I've been spending waay too much time watching videos on You Tube and while many of them are good, there are betting things for me to do with my time. C and I also have some household organization projects we'd like to tackle. The music room needs better organization so it can be usable practice space. We also want to organize all the bookshelves in the living room and get rid of books that we no longer want or use.

  This year I want to cook more vegetarian meals. Not that we plan to give up meat, but our diet could use a little more variety. I especially want to learn how to cook tofu as I like it. I know that liking tofu is a little strange, but I have strange tastes. C and I also want to do more biking this year. 

   I'm not sure how many of these things will get done or what new things will crop up. I do know that I'm excited to see what this new years will bring. We wish all of you a happy, healthy and safe 2024.

Sophie, C , Willow and Barnaby