View more pictures

I guess that Dave and Lisa were going to let me know sooner or later that Dave Falk had started to write a blog. Dave's blog is called Musings. I was recommended that I take note of it by Robert during a Scrabble game at Robert’s apartment that began as a way to get rid of two live lobsters in his refrigerator. How we came to play Scrabble this evening is more complex than that but for now I’m glad to see that I can have some great reading on the comings and goings of my sister and Dave. So far he only has written three posts but it is good to see he is taking good care of the dogs in Newton and keeping them free of Chocolate chips.

Lately people around me have been getting more active in their pursuits to publish. I am quite happy to see a growing garden of creative Internet activity among my family and friends. I heard from Kate that she intends to launch her own personal site shortly. Robert showed me a long set of amazing photos that he took over the course of his past few years of travels that he intends to place online to showcase his talents. Hattie registered demokitty.com and demomonkey.com. We are going to work together on Demomonkey as a consulting team focused on making prototypes and demos for companies that don’t have the creative talent to do it properly. Demokitty is reserved for when Hattie perceives that I lose interest in the venture and she can go at it alone. At least we are going to try.

So far those sites are all that I have heard about but I am sure there are dozens of underground projects amongst my friends and family that I could scoop before they go live with new domain names being registered left and right for cool new personal and business web projects.

On New Years Eve Sarah and I decided to be homebodies and stay in Brookline to host folks who were interested in spending New Years Eve in Brookline. Robert also had a party that he created the night before to host his friend Mark and his girlfriend. The concept for Robert’s New Years Eve festivities are best summed-up on the web page he created for it. Unfortunately I don’t recall the URL right now but I’ll try to find it at some point. Robert is a web designer so most projects he works on have a URL.

New Years was fun. Sarah lit plenty of dangerous candles throughout the apartment and we put out wine, cheese, and some unsalted pistachios that I was hoping people would get rid of for us. I got very tense and worried that we didn’t have any non-wine alcoholic beverages and worried that we didn’t have sufficient decorations so I quickly whipped together a photo-mosaic of the year 2004 that was a pretty rainbow color but very small and thus unimpressive and then went to the liquor store to purchase three six-packs of beer. I also futzed with the network until I could control the living room PC from the bedroom with VNC so that I could do remote control karaoke later in the evening.

Karaoke is among my favorite things to do with a bunch of people. It always entertains me that people feel that they haven’t had enough to drink in order to feel comfortable singing. I would sing karaoke in front of an audience in my underwear while stone sober. Note my New Year’s resolution number 1. (Get a job as an exotic male dancer). But I was happy to intoxicate our guests so that they were able to sing properly and with enough wine and champagne in them many of our guests were asking for Dolly Parton tunes to sing along to.

We also played some board games to pass the time until midnight. It wasn’t a lot of time since although I had panicked about not having ample entertainment at 9:00 including a quick pit stop at Stop and Shop to purchase mixed vegetables in a bag nobody really appeared until about 9:30 and most people didn’t arrive until about 10:30. That meant that most people only had to kill about an hour and a half with us in Brookline before the clock struck midnight and they could disperse and go home drunk or stick around and sing karaoke with us.

Meanwhile Robert had created his New Brunswick Bostonia celebration at his place and had lured Lisa and Dave to sing carols in both French and English throughout the downtown area along with a violinist that he had hired through Craig’s list, his friend Mark and Mark’s girlfriend. Apparently Mark and his girlfriend were reluctant to wander through the city followed by a violinist singing obscure Christmas carols in French but once they began they could be heard far louder than professionals like Dave and Lisa. I know this because I spent about twenty minutes watching the video at Robert’s place tonight prior to our Scrabble game. Mark’s girlfriend, who was the most adamant about not caroling, can be seen on the video buzzing the doorbells of many random people throughout Boston to inform them that carolers are awaiting them below. Mark and his girlfriend also brought the two lobsters that we consumed tonight all the way from New Brunswick. They had been living in Robert’s refrigerator until we interrupted them for our dinner tonight.

At out party we didn’t have singing until the streamkaraoke.com site was brought out but before then we did have a couple of board games that we played. I had wanted to play the game Go Mental because I had bought it for Nick and Christina for Christmas. They had brought Go Mental and Apples to Apples so we started with Go Mental. We tried to adapt the rules of the game to a drinking game but that was not very effective. Sarah and I were hopeless at the game which involved figuring out which item didn’t fit with the others. If we didn’t know we could challenge someone else and regardless of whether the question was about operas or sports Matt and Dave, the only people we could challenge seemed to always get them right. So we drank a lot of alcohol early in the evening despite not being able to create meaningful drinking game rules for Go Mental.

Sarah’s sister Christina called for the frozen margaritas that her husband Nick had brought. Nick’s birthday is on New Year’s so he was planning on having a grand time and both Nick and Christina were having a great time with the margaritas and an even better time when we finally switched from Go Mental to Apples to Apples. The Apples to Apples game was very effective for up to 11 people and worked just as well for large numbers if not better than with smaller numbers because the judge had so many entries to compare.

At midnight I had to improvise the countdown and since the TV didn’t work I turned to the Internet. MSNBC was broadcasting online a live feed from Times Square. It wasn’t a good feed and plenty of people made fun of our lack of a television but it took us into the New Year of 2005 and we cranked open lots of champagne and celebrated.

Sarah’s sister didn't agree with the many margaritas and took sick as we were cranking-up the karaoke. So Nick and a woman who loved singing karaoke, who was Dick’s friend’s fiancée, helped Christina outside and Nick and Christina made an early but post midnight exit. I generally have been avoiding drinks with tequila in them. It is way too easy to get sick drinking them. This woman who was a loose connection to us was great fun karaokeing with and was interested in going out on our karaoke team when we next decide to go out again. I was thinking that this Tuesday is the last good day for a while but it might be too close to New Years.

So folks slowly disappeared until nobody was left and then in the morning Sarah took sick to the point where she asked me to bring a pillow to the bathroom for her. The apartment looked like it had been trashed by the Huns from the Capital One advertisements.

We cleaned up the apartment a bit, ate some breakfast to replenish Sarah’s strength, and spent the whole day watching silly movies including Anchorman, Euro-trip, and Billy Madison while slowly recovering from some minor hangovers. Sarah’s was worse than mine but it reminded me to drink lots of fluids and made me glad that I had taken two Flintstones vitamins the night before. I can highly recommend all three movies as goofy comedies worth watching. I was surprised at how entertaining Euro-trip was.

View more pictures

So tonight while I was at the Pats game with Sarah in the upper-deck Robert called to ask me if I wanted to go on a midnight picnic tonight. I gave him a tentative vote yes but I could tell that Sarah was going to have nothing to do with freezing outside while eating. But once we got back from the game it had started raining so even I vetoed the outdoor picnic and Sarah and I went to Robert’s place to cook-up the lobsters in his fridge and played Scrabble. Robert won by spelling some difficult words like vixen and gonads. So did the Patriots although they probably didn't have much use for the word Vixen but maybe gonads? The Pats beat the 49ers 21-7. Both the lobsters lost but they tasted good.

Robert also loaned me one of his two copies of David Foster Wallace's book Infinite Jest. It is about a thousand pages with very small print so I probably will never finish it but I need something now that I finished Bob Dylan Chronicles Part I and Jeremy said that Salt was a boring book. How could a book just about salt be boring?