Happy New Year 2007!

No one in our house noticed the beginning of 2007. The kids and my father-in-law were asleep. Tomomi and I were ten minutes away from the end of Superman Returns and didn't notice.

(Spoiler and aside: Of the three dvd's we've watched during this vacation--The Da Vinci Code, The Pink Panther, and Superman Returns--two of them prominently feature the secret children of major heroes. It's been a big theme in literature for thousands of years, but interesting that two big Hollywood movies would pick it up at almost the same time.)

So midnight passed without fanfare but this morning we woke up for a traditional New Year's meal, osechi ryori (learn about it by clicking the link).

The kids played outside for a while in barely-above-freezing temperatures and found that it's pretty easy to catch cold-blooded critters when they're too cold to move. I didn't get a photo of the grasshopper, but here's a lizard that could only run in slow motion.

We went for a walk.

A friend visited, and we had tea. It's late afternoon and this is turning out to be a perfectly relaxing, refreshing, reflection-filled day.

I think it'll be a great year!

"The path of the righteous is like the first gleam of dawn, shining ever brighter till the full light of day." Proverbs 4:18