Happy New Year

A bit late, sure, but I’ve been busy.

On New Year’s Eve I was thinking about 2009 and 2010. Of course I was amused by the all the articles written in my youth expecting flying cars, etc. by 2010. But mostly I was thinking about 2009.

Was it a good year or a lousy year?

This, of course, depends on who you are. If you won the lottery in 2009, it was probably a great year. For me I tend to lump the year into four categories, world, sports, work, family.

The world is mainly stuck in a lousy economy so overall I’d have to say not a great year. Sure, the economy is improving, but pretty slowly. And nothing particularly great happened in 2009 in the world. I suppose nothing horribly bad happened either, but that’s not a glowing recommendation. We have a historic new president but it’s too early to say how that will turn out. Overall my rating here is moderately blah.

For sports it’s easy. The Yankees won the World Series. It was a great year. A+.

The work evaluation is trickier. I had a lot of fun working this year. Money was a bit tight though. I’m very happy with where our product ended up after a year. But I expected more clients by this point. But the overall reaction to our product has been very positive. I think I have to grade 2009 as an Incomplete. We’ll know if 2009 was worth it depending on how 2010 goes.

So that leaves family. A mixed bag here. I lost my mother this summer, though she had been battling Alzheimer’s so it was partly a blessing. My wife had a lousy stressful year working at Marsh and the relative uncertainty of Origami Risk didn’t help our family stress levels.

But our girls are great. Tori is a total piece of work at 3. She gets into everything. She will quietly disappear somewhere in our apartment. To the question, “Tori, what are you doing?”, she will answer, “Nothing”. It is never nothing. She can drive you crazy, totally not listening, grabbing everything that doesn’t belong to her and getting upset when you don’t let her use the screwdriver by herself. But she captures your heart with her laugh and smile. She laughs all the time. And she already has the tilt her head, bat her eyes and smile look down pat. She will clearly be dangerous.

Danielle is just  turning into a tall beautiful girl. She’s the more responsible older sister, but hugely creative, constantly drawing and building things. And totally daddy’s girl.

So was 2009 a good year? I have a great family, so every year is a good year.

and Danielle is turning into a big girl at 7.