Day: January 1, 2006

It’s the first day of a new year and I am look­ing for­ward to it in a big way. Of course, that atti­tude springs from hav­ing had such a great past year. Angela and I went on a cou­ple of adven­tures to Paris and Hawai’i this past year. I start­ed a new job and also (final­ly) obtained my pro­fes­sion­al license. Ange­la’s job reached a turn­ing point this past year and she has been very hap­py there, as well.

Since this is my web-site, it would­n’t seem right to pass up the oppor­tu­ni­ty to speak to how big 2005 was for the web and blog­ging. You can go to Google News and read all about how so many peo­ple got into blog­ging in the past year and how they made as much news they report­ed. How­ev­er, on a much more per­son­al lev­el, 2005 rep­re­sent­ed the oppor­tu­ni­ty for me to recon­nect with old friends and meet new ones. I read so much about social web appli­ca­tions and I cer­tain­ly would have been skep­ti­cal had I not been ben­e­fit­ing from how fun and effec­tive they could be at com­mu­ni­cat­ing.

I think the com­ing year will bet­ter (tech­nol­o­gy march­es on) with regards to con­nect­ing with friends and fam­i­ly. I’m learn­ing more how to ben­e­fit from what’s out there and doing my best to spread the word amongst every­one so we can all be a lit­tle more in touch. We’ve got some great tools to keep up with what is going on with every­one and their inter­ests. I’m sure we’ll get some even bet­ter ones in the next year and the ones we have will begin to work bet­ter togeth­er. Know­ing that we’re going to have some new tools is excit­ing, and hope­ful­ly some of my friends will be putting some great new tools, too.

As for right now, it’s been great to see fam­i­ly and friends in per­son (Of course, that’s what we’d always do if we could but we can’t). While blogs are great for learn­ing about the day-to-day news of peo­ple and get­ting to know more about their inner thoughts, there’s real­ly no sub­sti­tute for the spon­ta­neous inter­ac­tion of being togeth­er. We get to laugh with one anoth­er and we get to let the con­ver­sa­tion flow in ways that just one per­son could­n’t think of. It’s been won­der­ful to see both of our fam­i­lies and all our friends from Cookeville and Nashville. Read­ing blogs, check­ing up on Flickr pho­tos, fol­low­ing on dugg sto­ries or Del.icio.us links are so much fun when we’re apart, but get­ting to hug our friends and laugh with them is what we’re real­ly just bid­ing our time for.

Well, enough about blog­ging about it. I’m going to hang out with our flesh-and-blood rel­a­tives while we still can. Have a great 2006.