Akemashite Omedetou Gozaimasu.

And Happy New Year to everyone else.

I'm back from the land of the dial-up modem and carefully deleted browser history, and doing pretty good. I read a good book (A Wild Sheep Chase by Murakami) and ate like a glutton. I made two batches of molasses cookies on my grandmother's surly mixer, one which turned out pretty and puffy, one which turned out mostly normal but without all the flavor. I really need to get this recipe down for consistency.

Plenty of other stuff happened, but I'll wait until I get my photos organized before I start posting the stories. You can get the other side of things from my sister (you know where she went, right?).

The new goal is to write 30 letters/postcards in the month of January. I haven't started yet, but that's incentive to write thank you notes for once. I stopped writing them because my mother made it torture, but I think I'm ready to behave like an adult (about that) now. Also, I ran across a pretty great how-to written by a respected internetter. It's pretty much the way my mother taught me, but of course it sounds better coming from an outside source.

Ah, right, and I stopped posting because I killed my computer's hard drive, took it in, had all the data recovered (sigh) and got it back. Remarkably easy considering how much it cost. But it was worth it. I hadn't backed up recently (ahem, ever), and there was a lot worth saving (to me). I got a comment about the amount of music I had (15 gigs, probably more), but bah on them. I like my music digital.

Stay warm J-folk, stay sane state-siders.

PS: Might be heading back north in a few days, which means no posts. Sorry for the teaser!