New Year's Miscellanea

Happy New Year! I hope your New Year's Eve celebrations were as riotous as ours. We got together with some friends and played Im Schatten Des Kaisers, a boardgame that Michele and I bought in Germany. We were armed with a crude English translation of the rulebook, but it still took us a few turns before we were correctly identifying all of the playing pieces. (Turns out it's an excellent game--very strategic, in the vein of Settlers of Catan or Carcassonne.)

You know you're getting old when it's 11:00 on New Year's Eve and you're ready to pack it in. That's right--we didn't even stay up late enough to witness the Dropping of the Ball (a ceremony the appeal of which has always eluded me). One of our friends had a sermon to deliver at church the next morning, and you don't want the pastor dozing off during the service. So we called it a successful New Year's Eve.

Oh, and in other exciting New Year's news, I played around with the theme and layout here on the ol' blog. Gone is the Squad Leader visual theme, although it's sure to return at some point given my fondness for it.

Hope your New Year is off to a good start!