Maaaaaan… It’s been way too long. I took an unexpected hiatus during December because I just started my new job (which I love, by the way ) and I also traveled for the holidays. But now:

(If you don’t like Mulan, I question your life decisions.)

Yes, I’m still alive, everyone!

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to blog more, so subscribe to this blog by entering your email under the area on this page that says “Follow My Blog Via Email”. Depending on how you’re viewing this, it’ll be in the right sidebar area or at the bottom of the page.

That way, you’ll be the first to be notified when I publish a new post (lucky you! )

You can also follow me on Twitter and Instagram. My username is: HOPEsaidit.

Now that my shameless plugs are out of the way , let me tell you how I spent New Year’s Eve. (Warning: this was possibly the lamest year yet.)

Happy New Year!

My sister was in town, so I spent New Year’s Eve hanging with her and my husband. That wasn’t the bad part.

The lame factor came when it was time to watch the countdown on T.V. (Crowds, noise, and the cold isn’t my thing, so I surely wasn’t going to leave the comfort of my warm home to celebrate with a bunch of strangers.)

We turned the teletube to the popular Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest only to discover that our local station had bumped the programming for what they thought was T.V. gold. In actuality, it was countdown coal—worse than what Santa gives to naughty children. What did I do to deserve this?

I’ll refrain from naming the show to keep the embarrassment at a minimum, but let me just say that the city hosting it is too big to let that kind of programming pass through its airwaves.

The show was littered with local bands that NOBODY has heard of.  Who in their right mind would decide that it was a good idea to show Jimmy’s Junktastic Juke-Jointers as opposed to Taylor Swift? Heck, I would have settled for Jessie and The Rippers after the ridiculousness I witnessed.

The final straw was the pain my eyes endured by viewing the cheesiest T.V. engagement proposal to date. We had to change the channel after that. So, we started watching Pitbull’s New Year’s Revolution. (We briefly watched New Year’s Eve with Carson Daly, but after Terry Crews’ shirtless pectoral bounce fest when the east coast ball dropped , we decided it was best to switch ball drop providers.)

We were five minutes out from our midnight celebration when we realized that Pitbull’s New Year’s Revolution was going to do nothing more than a little countdown on the top-left corner of the screen for the central time zone viewers.

We scrambled for a real countdown, but all we could find was that local sad excuse for a New Year’s countdown.  And guess what? Their countdown was late. (You had ONE job, people! )

They did have great fireworks, though.  I’m sure the whole bash was fun for the people who went, but for us at home? We wanted no parts . Stream that mess on the internet next year.

Nevertheless, I brought in the new year with some of my favorite people (although I had to coerce my husband to actually stay up with us because he wanted to be Old Man Sleepyhead). Here’s to a great year! (That drink is non-alcoholic, of course.)