Rhyan\djay

My New Year’s Resolution (well, one of them anyway) is to blog more.

A familiar song, I know, but it’s going to be a new decade in a few hours, so we can hope. I reviewed the year a little in my last post, but I didn’t get much detail in the more recent events, so I figure I’ll expound on the holidays at least.

For the third year in a row, Meghan & I hosted both of our families together for Thanksgiving. It was fun having everybody in the house at once, and we managed to hone our cooking process to the point where we didn’t have to spend the first half of it in the kitchen while everybody else was hanging out. We accomplished this basically by cooking most everything the day before and reheating it. We also at a little earlier this year (1:30), which I think helped. Meghan’s parents stayed with us for the weekend this year, and we had a good time hanging out. We also discovered a love of Catchphrase.

We once again had two Christmases this year. The first one was the weekend before Christmas, celebrating with my family at our house. I cooked roast beef for the first time in my life (it turned out awesome, if I do say so myself). My entire family conspired to give us a new washing machine for Christmas, which was nice. The idea was that maybe it would help us dry our laundry in less than three hours, which, perhaps not entirely unsurprisingly, it didn’t. But it’s a lot nicer washing machine than the old one we had, so it’s still rad. Meghan & I exchanged gifts along with my family, so we wouldn’t have to transport them to Savannah just to bring them back again. Meghan got me the new Super Mario Wii game, which is awesome, along with a new set of clippers (to cut my hair) and a noise machine (to fall asleep to).

For our second Christmas, we once again flew down to Savannah to spent the weekend with Meghan’s family. Meghan’s dad bought the entire state of Georgia’s supply of beer (or so it seemed), so we had a good time. Hehe. Christmas Eve we went to Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse for dinner, where I had what I described as the ‘best meal I’ve ever eaten’. I had a ribeye that almost made me weep. We also had a sweet potatoe casserole that was basically the best thing ever. And creme brulee for dessert. Also, a really good Belgian Trippel that I can’t remember the name of.*

And of course, we also drove out Tybee Island (where Meghan got attacked by a black cat) , played a bunch of Catchphrase, and went on golf cart rides. We had a good time.

Since we were in Savannah, we got to completely avoid the great (or not-so-great?) blizzard of ‘09. Our neighbor even cleared our driveway for us while we were gone. Hooray!

Okay, so this is all poorly written and not very detailed. But, hey, I’m out of practice. I’ll try to do better next year.

* – Yeah, I ended a sentence in a preposition. WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT PUNK?!

Greetings!  Happy holidays!

I hope this season of cheer finds you and yours doing well.  The end of the year is a time for reflection, renewal and hope, and it’s in that spirit that I write this letter.

It’s been, in many ways, a boring year.  There are no big changes to report from Meghan or I… same jobs, same house, no additions to the family.  In other ways, it’s been a terribly interesting year, and I do mean ‘terribly’.

In January, my employment situation finally got straightened out after having our company split in two in December and essentially leaving me with a two choices of employers.  I chose to stick with my original employer, which I think has been a good move.  During the split, the other guy got the office space, leaving us homeless, which eventually resulted in me getting to work from home, which basically fulfilled a lifelong dream.

In February, we got to go to Cancun for Meghan’s work’s annual sales incentive trip which was also fantastically awesome.  It was our second vacation trip to Mexico in less that 6 months.  As it turns out, this year we’ll get to back to Cabo, the site of our fabulous honeymoon, and stay in the Riu property right next door to the one we stayed at on our honeymoon.

From there, the year got harder.  In March, my extended family took a huge blow with the loss of my youngest cousin David.  His death was completely unexpected and horribly tragic.  And as brave as everyone has been about it, I think the recovery process is really only just beginning.

Also, around that time, Meghan & I discovered she was pregnant.  Unfortunately, it was only a couple of weeks until we found out that the pregnancy was not going to result in a baby.  The rest of the year is easily forgotten when I think about that.

If you’ve been wondering why my blog posts are few and far between, that’s pretty much the reason.  Whenever I sit down to write something, this is what comes out.  Which I suppose means that this is what I should be writing about, but it’s not easy and not pleasant.

I know that we’re not alone in the whole miscarriage thing.  Almost every one of my friends and family who have children now went through at least one miscarriage along the way.  I’m not worried that we won’t be able to get pregnant again (if anything, the miscarriage taught us that getting pregnant is certainly possible for us).  But sometimes I feel like we’re just waiting for it to happen again and everything we do is just a way of passing the time until we get there.  I’m sure this is how a lot of people feel when they go through a miscarriage.

Which isn’t to say the rest of the year sucked.  There was the garage sale in June, the Phish concert weekend in July, my birthday in August, painting our family room and Meghan & I’s first wedding anniversary in September, having our families here for Thanksgiving… and lots of other fun stuff that I didn’t blog about and therefore can’t remember right now.  We had a lot of fun this year at various times; we also had hardships to deal with.  Such is life.  I’m sure the next year will have its ups and downs as well.  Let’s just hopes the ups outweight the downs and that the downs are LESS down.