New(?) Year

So the new year is well and truly upon us, a chance for new beginnings and fresh starts, a time to reflect upon the lessons of the previous year even as we look forward to the new lessons that lie ahead.
Or, you know, to just keep doing what we’ve been doing.
I’m not one for making resolutions, and, honestly, I’m more likely to just keep doing what I’ve been doing, so while there are some new beginnings and fresh starts ahead for me, I don’t foresee any astounding changes waiting for me in 2008.
There will be more money waiting for me, which is clearly a good thing, and what looks to be a more interesting and fulfilling job that will be providing said money, which is also a good thing.
But working five days a week? That I’m not looking forward to.
I suppose the inevitable question of “Jon, what did you do for New Years?” arises, or at least I’m saying, for rhetorical purposes, that it arises, and my answer to the question is, unsurprisingly, “Not much.”
I’d gone grocery shopping the morning of New Year’s Eve and had bought some sort of cheap steak that I wasn’t sure what to do with, so I opted to make Swiss Steak. It turned out okay, though the gravy was a bit bland. Apart from that, I parked my ass on the couch and watched HGTV for a few hours. The parking my ass on the couch part was the result of me not wanting to head back upstairs to the office to work on the Katherine Heigl picture. By that point I’d finished pretty much everything except the hair. Hair, as most regular readers know, is sort of my nemesis when it comes to drawing, and the hair in this particular image was especially challenging. I think the end result of my slapdash attempt at rendering the complex do turned out okay, but it’s got nothing on the real deal, but if I’d tried to render a perfect copy of the original, I’d probably have ended up working on it all through 2008, so, as I usually, I settled for what I could manage.
Working on the picture carried me through the end of 2007 and into the beginning of 2008.
Now I’m certain that there are worse ways to spend your New Year’s Eve than putting the finishing touches on a rendering of Katherine Heigl’s side boob, but I’m not certain that there are any ways that are sadder or more pathetic.
Still, “sad and pathetic” was an appropriate note on which to end one year and begin the next for me, so it all works out in the end, I guess.
Yesterday was even less active. I called my mom, and then later she called me so that I could talk to my nephew Todd, who’d been staying with her, before his mom picked him up.
In the evening I followed this chicken recipe I found online and learned, once again, that it doesn’t pay for me to try to fry breaded chicken, as in the process of removing it from the oil I always end up ripping the breading off.
And that was the exciting way in which I kicked off the new year.