January 1, 2014 -- Happy New Year

New Year's Eve...December 31, 2013. Adios to the old year. It hasn't been too bad as years go. Things are slowly getting better in general. Sometimes it's two steps forward and one step back.....but that is still progress.

Somethings never change...I spent the morning doing my usual dilly dally time wasting stuff.  I did get my mp3 player going again and stopped with the Christmas music. That put me in a good mood. Actually, I've been in a good mood for a while.

For lunch I went to Kaktus Brewing in Bernalillo. I had a boar brat and ordered it with mustard and kraut...I got it with ketchup. Dana was not tracking things well but it was good.   Bjorn showed up. He had already made the rounds to a couple brew-pubs and was heading ....slowly...back up to Placitas. We talked again for a while. I asked him to explain -- again-- what he did. He makes the systems that motion picture studios use to do computer generated effects. He went down a list of movies he worked on but I only remember the Spider-man movies.  Lots of destruction...that was what he did. He 'almost' got the job doing the Geiko lizard.  Times are tough so he is looking for other stuff to do.

My next stop was the Santa Ana Star casino. I took $20.00 and came out with $27.00 so that was good. Of course I could have come out with close to $50.00 but I'm happy to leave richer than when I went in.   That doesn't happen much.

My New Year's Eve dinner was baked macaroni and cheese.  I ate about half so I'll finish it off on New Year's Day.

I tried to watch YoYo Ma on PBS but hey were doing stuff that didn't seem like music. I watched a few episodes of Modern Family and a PBS show on Christianity and then switched to my Joe Bonamassa DVD as it got close to midnight. I stayed up to hear the random gunfire but there wasn't anything noisy going on in my little neighborhood.  Watson and I finally went off to bed.


Jan 1st -- warm (lower 50s) sunny but really windy.

Here is a quote to ponder as we start the new year....
"It is bad enough not getting what you want, it is much worse, at the end of the journey to feel that this is not what you wanted any way .. all along Bail out, while there is still a journey ahead of you."   - The Physician Anthropologist

I got up feeling good except my right knee has been giving me some pain. I have a 3-4 hour walk scheduled with a meetup group today. I decided to skip it and let my knee rest. It was almost too windy to be out that long, anyway.

I watched about a half hour of the Rose Parade. They go on and on to the point that I can't sit and watch them. Being there in person might be different. The Macy's parade is the worst there is to watch on TV.  It is now just a vehicle to promote lousy TV shows put on by the network that is broadcasting the parade.

This is not cake

My plan for the day was to make Gooey Butter Cake as sort of a new tradition for New Year's Day.  I had given thought to inviting people in for an open house for the day and having the cake for  dessert.  Well, I followed the recipe but the cake never really went beyond the pudding stage. I've made this before with the same recipe and it was great. I baked it at 310 degrees (I hiked up the temperature 10 degrees thinking that might help with the altitude difference) for the required 40 minutes. I got it out and it looked like maybe it was OK. After cooling an hour I checked it and the inside was like pudding with a toasty crust on the outside. I put it back in the oven at 350 degrees for 25 minutes. It got toastier but it was still like pudding inside. I let it cool and after a while I tried it....spooning it out of the dish. It was still pudding. I need a class on how to bake stuff at 5,800 feet elevation.

I tried to console myself by working on a budget for this new year. I reviewed my spending based on Quicken. There were a few flaws in my record keeping that I had to fix. There were no real surprises. I'm sort of holding my own but I don't know what the tax situation will be.

After eating the Gooey Butter Pudding I needed to get some exercise so I took a walk around the loop. That's about a mile and takes 20 minutes or so. It was pretty windy.

Dinner was some fish and leftover Mac & Cheese.  Watched the Crossroads concert (Eric Clapton, etc) and then CSI and finally the last of Endeavor.