New Look For A New Year

I thought it was about time to update the look of my blog. Before you get too impressed, I did not actually design the new layout of my blog. I used one of the free templates supplied by blogger. I've made a modification to the template and will probably make more modifications in the future. Blogger is making it easier and easier to maintain my blog. They offer a commenting system now, so I've switched from the third-party comment provider I was using (Haloscan). This means that the comments that were previously posted on this blog will no longer appear. The comments still exist on the Haloscan website (accessible only to me via password). Blogger doesn't have a way for me to import those comments. At least not yet. So please, post your comments folks! As 2005 rolls in, I resolve to keep on bloggin' on. After all, we bloggers have been nominated People of the Year by ABC News.

Brad and I rang in the new year quietly, as we usually do. We don't relish going out on the roads on New Year's Eve. We'll leave the partying to other hardier souls. We popped a cork in front of the telly and watched Jools Holland's Hootenanny. We saw some great musical acts including Mavis Staples, Amy Winehouse, Eric Clapton, Natasha Bedingfield, Franz Ferdinand and a few others I'd never heard of before. Like a pixie-ish dynamite of a jazz musician named Jamie Cullum and the Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain who performed a fantastic rendition of Nirvana's "Smells Like Team Spirit".

Despite our modest festivities, I couldn't help but feel so sad about the horrific tragedy wreaked by the recent earthquake and tsunami. I can't help thinking about the terrifying conditions the survivors are going through right now. It is almost incomprehensible. Not almost, but most. And the staggering loss of life. I am afraid to turn on the news anymore. I hear that aid is finally beginning to reach the affected areas now. May the healing and rebuilding begin.