Welcome, 2007!

In case you slept through it, 2007 has arrived.

We went over to the Herbrandsons yesterday afternoon/evening/early morning to say good-bye to the old year and hello to the new year. We had some dinner, then played some games, while I made an attempt to get rid of some adware that was plaguing a computer.

Getting rid of the adware was the easy part. Earlier in the day, System Restore was used to try to get the computer back to a point where AutoCAD would function again. After that, for one reason or another, AOL's security center user-interface no longer came up. So the computer spent much of the evening and night downloading the security center software again, and installing it. As soon as that was done though, AutoCAD stopped working. Oh, oh... Apparently there are some incompatibilities with the components installed by the security center software and AutoCAD. There probably isn't a solution other than to ditch one or the other. I recommended trying out Windows OneCare instead of AOL's software (which actually is a combination of CA's PestPatrol and McAfee's VirusScan and Firewall). Hopefully that will resolve the current issues.

We took over some inari-sushi over there as our contribution to the dinner. Gerry, in particular was a bit skeptical, as his last experience with sushi was not very positive. But after tasting one of the ones we brought, I'm sure he would have cleaned off the entire plate by himself, if he was allowed to do so.

We got home around 1 a.m. I woke up past 9 a.m. this morning. Since there was a little bit of the sushi rice left from last night, I prepared some eggs and carrots to put into maki-sushi. The tool used to roll the sushi is over at the church, so I made do with a kitchen towel, so the rolls couldn't be rolled as tightly as they should. I guess it really doesn't matter once they get eaten.

Yesterday, in the early afternoon hours, I went over to a couple of homes of members who hadn't made it to church on Sabbath to offer them Communion. I had good visits with them.

We learned that in this city, New Year's fireworks occur on New Year's day. I don't know whether or not it will actually happen today. This month has seen a number of quite windy days. Plus it continues to rain heavily.

Today, no stores are open. In fact, on all major holidays, no stores are open. So we've been having to learn to anticipate and prepare for holidays, to make sure we have all the necessary groceries and supplies. It's not like the big cities where even on Thanksgiving Day or Christmas Day, you can run out and find something open. Or even if not in a large city, you can drive to one if needed. When we discover we are missing something, we have to rely on the graciousness of friends and neighbors -- which may not be a bad thing.