It was a blissfully quiet start to 2019 here in the Richard household. The dining room, as beautiful and functional as it was during the holiday season – it never looked better! – was stripped of all its Christmas dressings, cleaned from top to bottom, and the dining room table adorned with a new centerpiece I bought at the Tranquility Trail thrift store for only fourteen bucks. Looks great, doesn’t it?

The same with the office, where the old ceramic tree originally given Tracey thirty years ago by my mom was returned to another year of storage in the garage. With the heat that place gets during a Valley of the Sun summer, it’s amazing it has held up this long. But it has. The Christmas tree in the living room and the outdoor house lights and decorations will have to wait until Saturday to come down, but come down, they will!

The first day of a new year has another tradition in the Richard household – which is, starting preparation for tax season. So all the receipts and the bills paid by check during 2018 are removed from their respective drawer and desk slot (only one slot this year, thanks to reducing our credit card usage to two cards and then paying them off as they are used) and put into Fry’s shopping bags for future reference. I’m not sure if we’re going to do the taxes this year ourselves or whether we’ll have someone else do them for us; either way, I’ll soon be working on the master Excel spreadsheet that will steer the process through to its inevitable (and expensive!) end.

Even though it was unusually rainy and cold on New Year’s Eve, I did some grilling and spirits were high so I got decked out in the “Commander in Beef” grilling apron my sis-in-law Tammy gave me for a Christmas present:

You don’t get too many New Years in the Valley of the Sun where it is cold and rainy (disappointing for all the folks visiting their snowbird friends for the holidays, I’m sure), but after two more mornings where the temps will be either at or below freezing, it looks like a return to the kind of “Arizona winter” most folks are accustomed to around these parts. The coming weekend would be perfect for hitting golf balls if I could hit golf balls, but that ain’t gonna happen anytime soon. My physical therapist says the hand is coming along nicely, but she says it will likely be another month before I start feeling comfortable enough to begin hitting balls, and that I need to be patient and let the healing process run its course. I hope she’s right – I’ll feel better about things only after hearing what the hand doctor says when I visit him next Monday. Hoping for the best.

At any rate, the year is off to a flying start!