Keep Chopping

New Year's Day!  It was so cold outside, and we stayed indoors the whole time.  In fact, we haven't been outside all year!

We tried a few board games today, including the one you see above.  It's not technically a board game, of course.  The object is simple:  stack up chairs, one at a time, until someone accidentally knocks them all down.  We were inspired by the one act in "La Nouba" when we chose this one.  We hadn't gotten around to playing this, so it was new.  It's also pretty short and simple, so we did another board game:  "A Jedi's Life."  We've gone to this one a lot, a version of the game of LIFE, where you grow and learn as a Jedi.  Madison won each time, as Daddy struggled to simply get to the end of the game.  It's all good though:  Daddy made it as a Jedi Wookie.

We were taking down a few of the Christmas trees today, and here's a three-hour event:  the first movie of the Hobbit Trilogy.  We were back in Middle Earth again, and we'll be staying there for another two movies this week.  That's eighteen hours of Middle Earth, for those of you keeping score.  Madison and Mommy are really immersed in it.  Daddy too:  he hasn't seen the Hobbit trilogy yet, but he knows the story very well from when he was younger.   These might be good books to get later on down the road.

We called a few relatives, and talked to them on Skype to wish them a Happy New Year.  It's cold everywhere, and there's an amazing weather pattern that is threatening to mess with everyone's lives up north.  And oddly enough, south of here.  Snow in South Georgia?  Yes, indeed!

Finally, there was a football game tonight of significance, the Rose Bowl.  It's been years since Daddy has last watched the Rose Bowl, somewhere back in the 90's.  College football was not quite an obsession, but still a fun diversion.  I was a big Cornhusker fan in the 90's, for some odd reason.  Obviously, if you're in Georgia this week, you have to be a UGA fan.  Tonight's game was epic.
It featured the Georgia Bulldogs, who won the game with an incredible double overtime victory.  It was not a game for the faint of heart.

Below is a Georgia Bulldogs Sermon we wrote, one that we'll be sharing this Sunday before the National Championship Game.  It uses quotes from the current players, and follows that theme of their season, "Keep Chopping."

This will be a week of hype about the Georgia Bulldogs, who haven't visited the National Championship Game since 1981, I think.  So folks around here are certainly excited, despite the arctic temperatures.

One more thought:  it's 2018.  We started this blog in 2009.  That makes this the tenth year this blog has been going, although it won't be until 2019 that we'll have done ten whole years of writing.  Still, there are ten different years to choose from when looking back upon this blog, and an entry for every day since the one we started on way back in 2009.  That's quite a stretch, and it's been quite a journey, writing about each day since then.  One day this year, we'll be celebrating a significant ten-year anniversary:  Madison's adoption was in 2008.  Time has been fleeting indeed, but we've done our best to fill it the best way we can.  We'll continue that in 2018.

Happy New Year!