Happy New Year!!

Wow...2010. When you're "old" like me, that just sounds weird. Almost science-fictiony, huh? Lol.

I watched the Rose Parade this morning... it starts so much later when you live on the East coast! The Parade is such a tradition for me... I grew up in Southern California, and my grandparents lived right there in Pasadena (in fact, my parents actually met while attending Pasadena City College! hehe) Every year we would walk over to Colorado Blvd. and watch the parade... sometimes dad and grandpa would bring a ladder so us kids could sit up there and see over the crowd (which wasn't quite so big in those days!) When I was a teen, I belonged to the "Petal Pushers", which was a group sponsored by the Lutheran Church ( The Lutheran Hour has had a float in the parade for years). We'd get farmed out to all sorts of groups, whoever needed help decorating their float. I've glued hundreds (probably thousands!) of flowers and seeds and stuff to floats in the past! Fabulous fun!! In "lucky" years, if our particular youth group got to work on the 31st, we'd spend the night in some church gym and go to the parade in the morning. A couple other years, I and some similarly crazy friends spent the night right on the sidewalk, staking our claim for a good viewing position the next morning. And yeah, even in sunny Southern California, it gets pretty dang cold overnight when you are in just a sleeping bag!! Once I remember waking up to feeling kinda squished in my sleeping bag - and some people were sitting on me! Absolute strangers! Didn't want to get dirty by sitting on the sidewalk I guess... I think that was the same year I foiled a purse-snatcher.... Good times, good times!

The downside, of course, is that every year it looks so absolutely beautiful there in SoCal, sunny and warm, and all those folks freezing in the gray and snowy midwest would pack up and move there.... it got so crowded my family had to move to Idaho!! Where it's gray and snowy.... huh....


Anyhoo ~ HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YOU ALL!!