Bringing you up to date

I have this unspoken rule that if I link to your blog and you go more than a month without updating it, I typically just cut you from my list o' blogs. It's nothing personal; it's just that my blog roll is there mainly for me to scroll down and check out people whose stuff I enjoy reading. If you haven't put up anything new to read in a while, I give you the pink slip so I can keep my list fresh.

Now I'm the one who's about to hit the one-month mark, so for those of you out there who still check in occasionally to cocktailswithkevin.com to see what's going on (I think now my readership is up to four -- count them FOUR -- family members and the occasional misguided googler) here's a brief update.

Christmas came and went, and while I had counted on fatherhood meaning I had seen the last of gifts that were purchased for me excusively, I really cleaned up this Christmas. As a rule, I'm not good at coming up with things on the spot when you ask me what I want for a gift. My theory is that if I want it, I buy it. If I haven't bought it, it's because I can't afford to buy it, and if I can't afford to buy it, I really wouldn't feel comfortable asking you to buy it for me. Sometimes I might want something but I don't trust someone else to go buy it so I don't put that on a wish list either.

Speaking of wish lists, the concept of making a list online of things I want but don't have sounds more depressing to me than it does intriguing, but for those of you who got a little extra Christmas monies don't know how to spend it, feel free to check out and purchase something from my wife's Amazon greed list. If she hasn't added them yet, we also need four new tires for one of the cars and maybe a couple of months mortgage payment. Thanks for giving.

Anyway, topping the list of wonderful gifties I got this Christmas was a Zen mp3 player. The thing's got 30 gigs worth of memory which easily should allow me to transfer my entire music collection from CD's and a computer hard drive to the unit itself. Because one gadget isn't enough for me, I then went to purchase additional gadgets for my new gadget. I wanted something to play the music on my car stereo so I spent $20 on an FM transmitter from Brookstone. It works like a Mr. Microphone so all I have to do is plug it into the headphone jack of he mp3 player and then tune a nearby radio to the same station it broadcasts out on.

Interestingly enough the same gadget can be used to listen to international radio on my home stereo system if I plug the gadget into the computer speakers and then point my browser to whatever radio station I want to listen to. Right now it's France Bleu Provence which is what my wife and I woud listen to on our first anniversary as we toodled around the south of France in a rented Peugeot. Let me just say that France Bleu rocks almost as much as my new mp3 player, and as geeky as it sounds, I like listening to the weather and traffic report en français. They also do this bit occasionally where someone calls in to offer something to sell. These brave souls give out their phone number to everyone on the planet with the hopes of selling some old laptop or a car or something. I want to ring them up just to chat, but I can't afford the overseas call. Lucky for them.

Between Christmas and the New Year the world watched as Hussein was executed for committing crimes against humantiy. I don't know which is more disturbing: that one person could do such horrible things and still look at himself in the mirror the next day or that the whole world salivated over his hanging. Gross on so many different levels I don't like to think about it.

My wife and I threw a party New Year's day and invited friends to help us ring in the new year. Our friends, like us, have for the most part followed the same general path in life. We've all gone from sinful cohabitators to married twenty-somethings to married thirty-somethings to married thirty-somethings with kids. Now that Elaine and I have a kid of our own, we didn't want anyone to feel left out, kids included, so we opened up the invite to everyone who was old enough to show off their new toy, laugh hysterically at a movie they had already seen, or crap their diaper. Kids, I mean. To my knowledge none of our adult guests crapped his diaper.

Elaine and I always say that if we throw a party and she and I don't see each other until the party's over, that usually means it was a good shindig. That's kind of how this one went. There was plenty of food and drink, great cameraderie and nothing got broken. We resolved to make this our new annual event.

My new year is off to a new exciting twist as I start a part-time gig in the evenings teaching English to non-native speakers through a nearby community college. Additionally I've decided to try and drum up some more real estate business. I had a recent closing with a dear client this past Chrismukah season and while the transaction had headaches galore, I realized how much I miss the rigamarole of marketing a home and getting it sold. The stress a real estate agent can go through is frankly unimaginable to some, but somehow shaking a new homeowner's hand across the closing table makes it all worth it.

A year ago I wrote about how I spent the last work day of 2005 knee-deep in Kleenex soaked in my own snot. If that's not enough detail, you can read more about it here. This must be an annual thing for me because once again I seem to be fighting off some mung-ridden typhoid. I also wrote about how I don't generally make resolutions for the new year. That's true for the most part, but I've decided to make a few this time around. Here they are so you can hold me to them:

I will be better about thanking the people I need to thank whether it be through an email or a mailed thank-you card or a phone call. Everyone appreciates being appreciated. The intricacies of my busy life are no excuse to avoid being kind to those who deserve my gratitude.

I had more but as today is January 2, I've already forgotten them.