So, although I opened the year with something of a political personal reflection thing, I suspect at least some people are interested in the more mundane “what I did” sort of posts around here. Those are useful for me, because it helps me remember when I actually did things, and it lets me share some of the interesting adventures I’ve had.

This post may or may not contain interesting adventures.

Much of the interesting early bits of Christmas vacation have been chronicled previously; I could make mention of the trip to the Richmond Metro Zoo on Christmas Eve morning; it’s close, and decent enough, and makes for a nice couple of hours’ diversion. The lemurs and spider monkeys are fun to watch, and you get to feed giraffes.

Somewhere in there the eldest and I went to see Spielberg’s War Horse, because she could get extra credit in Social Studies class if she saw it over break and wrote a report/review essay. I found out Monday that she was the only one in her class that did. Oh well, it was good for her, and put some of the WWI history she’d been studying this year into context; and extra credit’s extra credit. As for my review, I’d call it a pretty good fusion of two different Spielbergs: the 80s “Boy and his -blank-” stories like E.T., combined with the modern historical war epics like Saving Private Ryan. ‘Twas a solid enjoyable film, and a nice diversion for a weekday afternoon.

The week between Christmas and New Years Day was largely sedate, beyond a few little trips out shopping for bargain candy and taking middle child out to the movies (largely to make up for the fact that I took the eldest the week before), this time, to see The Adventures of Tin-Tin: The Secret of the Unicorn, also, conveniently, directed by Speilberg, and covering his other base – the rollicking action-adventure a la Indiana Jones; only this time, he was backed amiably by the Special Effects oomph of Peter Jackson, with a script by Steven Moffat (of Doctor Who and Sherlock, Edgar Wright (Sean of the Dead, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World) and Joe Cornish (who did last year’s favorite, Attack the Block). In this case, too many talented cooks don’t really spoil the meal – it was a fun, family-friendly adventure film which entertained us greatly. I can’t compare it to the comics source material, as I’ve never read it, but it was a lot of fun.

Otherwise, I played a bunch of Skyrim, did more than my share of laundry, watched some Doctor Who, and coasted until the weekend, when we got a houseguest for a couple of days, a friend of the eldest who moved out of state a few months back. Our houseguest was, as always, pleasant and polite (I could go into how the presence of these sort of guests brings out the worst in my own children’s behavior, but I won’t), and helped out when I spent New Year’s Eve morning picking up trash with my friend Jason for the adopt-a-highway program, seeing 2011 off with some pleasant service to the community. The most interesting bit of trash I found was a broken Louisville Slugger and a cache of trashed Christmas decorations.

We rung in the new year with our gaming friends, eating tasty food, rolling dice, and adventuring both through the end of our medieval campaign and starting a spaceship-based campaign inspired by Traveller and Firefly, late into the night. Fairiemom’s playing a cat-girl in this one, it should be interesting.

New Year’s Day involved sleeping in way late, then taking care of a few other things and putting our houseguest on a plane back home. We put the kids back in school Monday (i was off, the federal holiday shifted one day), and relaxed and tried to start falling back into the usual weekly pattern.

And thus, here I am. Back on the road, figuring out where the project got to while I was gone. Luckily, not too far, because everyone else was gone too. Our team is one short at the moment, given that one of us got a well-deserved promotion that doesn’t involve road duty, and we got a new team lead, who’s kind of been here all along, but not “officially”. We’re still trying to figure out how these changes are going to shake out, but it’ll be okay, as we all mostly know what we’re doing, or can at least fake it well enough to get by.

And, that’s about it for now. The new year has started, con season’s around the corner (Marscon is only two weeks away), and I’ve recently noticed that this blog, or some version of it, is fast coming up on it’s tenth anniversary, if you’re measuring from the ancient history section, which I have decided that I am. I may have to do something to acknowledge that.

I considered talking about goals for the year, bloggy and otherwise, but I came to the conclusion that I really do know better. I might do something general, eventually – the year’s new, and I reserve the right to change my mind – but don’t start getting all anticipatory.