Skip to main content

Happy New Year's!

Happy New Year's from the Copelands! I am finally feeling recovered after last night's excitement. Katie and Reed visited from Minnesota for the holiday, just as they did last year. I think this is an excellent tradition they've started!

Along with Tanya and Jorge, we all took a champagne cruise around Manhattan and ate a great prix-fixe meal at Gustorganics. We toasted the New Year at Tanya and Jorge's apartment, happily avoiding the disastrous crowds at Times Square. I hope Katie and Reed had as much fun as we did!

I thought it pertinent to tell everyone my resolutions this year. I figure, if I tell all of you about them, maybe I will be guilted into actually accomplishing them. So, here are my resolutions for the New Year:
  1. Start making the bed every day. I have always hated making the bed. I thought it was an exercise in futility to make a bed that you will unmake later that night. Suddenly, last week, we made the bed and it looked great! Our room looks cleaner and more welcoming. Have I finally grown up?
  2. Obvious one: diet and exercise. I plan to start jogging. I bought the shoes, I know where I am going to go but I am nervous about the whole thing. My plan is to start slowly, walking regularly and building up by jogging in small increments. My goal is to be able to run a mile. I honestly don't know if I have ever done that.
  3. Read an equal number of fiction and non-fiction books. I want to keep a balance in my reading habits this year. I recently finished Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation (about her travels and tales from visiting sites associated with presidential assassinations) and I loved it so much that I want to integrate more non-fiction into my reading routine.
  4. Learn Spanish so that I can communicate with my neighbors. My super and I have developed a very complicated system of hand gestures that could be simplified with a little learning on my part. Plus I think that I would really enjoy the shows on Telemundo if I knew what they were saying.
I will let you know how these go. Happy New Year's, everyone!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Spareribs, Sauerkraut and Dumplings

For Valentine's Day this year I cooked a dish that reminds me of home like no other.  It's a family recipe that my Mom knows by heart and my Dad gets on special holidays. Spareribs, sauerkraut and dumplings: Here's my plate before I started inhaling it.     Not everyone likes it.  I didn't like it until I was an adult and came across a very similar dish in the Czech Republic.  I craved home-cooked food at the time and I instantly became obsessed with the dish. The tricky part about the recipe is that it wasn't really written down.  My Grandmother, Anita, wrote a copy for my Mom a long time ago but my Mom has since changed parts to simplify the recipe.  This is the recipe that my Mom told me and I adjusted on my own. For the Dumplings: These are the dumpling when they were boiling, as they start to get done, they float to the top of the water. 3 c bread crumbs (about a half of a loaf dried on a tray for a day and broken up in a food processor) 3-4 c grated r

May 2017 Update

Despite the appearance of my blog over the past year, I am still alive and kicking. I've had a great past year. It was filled with adventures and good times. What have I been up to? 1. I'm walking a ton. At a minimum, I try to walk 10,000 steps a day. When you work a desk job, that is a lot of steps. If I work from home, don't go anywhere, and don't make an effort, I can walk around 2,000 steps in a day. To hit 10,000, I have to make a serious effort. This leads to long rambles to Minnehaha Falls, the Mississippi River, Fort Snelling and circles around the Mall of America. I try to snap cool videos and photos while I walk. I took a short video of Minnehaha Falls this spring: I also snap pictures of the wildlife I manage to stumble across, like this adorable duck family: 2. I've traveled a bit. I went with friends to Massachusetts and Maine a month or so ago. Best selfie from the trip: Brian and I also took a trip to Hawaii in November. I

Halloween Project 2009: Zombie Box

I love zombie movies. My first date with Brian, I made the poor guy watch Dawn of the Dead and Shaun of the Dead . A while back I saw a photo of a glass case that held a fake shotgun that said "in case of zombies break glass" (click here for my original inspiration). Of course, I wanted one. However, they were a promotional item for a videogame. Plus, the shotguns were fake, not at all useful if zombies actually were going to attack. I tried to see if I could buy one of those fire cases that hold fire extinguishers and fire blankets and just adapt it. Those boxes, it turns out, cost at least a hundred dollars. I decided to take matters into my own hands and build myself an emergency box to prepare for the zombie apocalypse. I bought a frame for a few bucks from a discount store and hand painted the glass: The objects surrounding the glass were part of my "cat deterrence system." Oddly it worked. Livia prefers to sit on my paper projects anyways. I built a