Happy New Year!

May you all have a happy, healthy, and prosperous new year!

We had our usual quiet evening, starting out with a trip to church for an early vigil mass. Pretty light attendance, though much of the parish is probably away for the holidays.

We watched a couple of movies while we nibbled on smoked salmon, cheese, and crackers. And we drank a little French apple cider (the hard variety), a little Belgian beer, and finished with some very American bubbly. We really enjoyed the one movie, Woody Allen's Curse of the Jade Scorpion, which has Woody back doing the kind of comedy he does best. Then it was the action-adventure movie Tomb Raider -- The Cradle of Life. Not what you would call a great movie, but certainly entertaining.

We didn't quite know what to expect at midnight, since customs around the world vary quite a bit, but we found that we got treated to about 30 minutes of pretty impressive fireworks being set off around the neighborhood. There were roman candles, skyrockets, and aerial display shells and reports. Took us back to the days when we lived in Texas, and you could legally buy some pretty good fireworks. We'll have to find out where the fireworks are obtained here though I'm pretty sure they are quite illegal.