Happy New Year

Three nuts roasting by an open fire on Christmas Day

Happy New Year!

So it’s been about a month since my last post ended with the words, “See you next week!” Clearly, things did not go according to plan. Sadly, later that week, we learned that my wife’s brother had passed away, and the following week we flew out to North Carolina for his funeral. I had to come back home for work, while my wife stayed out with her parents for Christmas. (She had always planned on spending the holiday with her family, but under much less tragic circumstances.)

Between her brother’s passing, the funeral, and my being home alone (well, alone with three cats, a parrot, and a gecko), I wasn’t feeling much like writing anything. It’s been a crappy end to a crappy year that started with needing to put several tens of thousands of dollars into home repair and ended in tragedy, with health issues, work frustrations, and general upset with the state of the world filling in the middle of what turned out to be a misery burrito of a year.

Having said that, we want 2019 to be better, or at least the parts we have control over. So I thought I would talk about some of our plans, and kind of preview what you can expect to see here.

As regular readers of this blog know, we love going to the Disney Parks for vacations. However, we visited Disneyland so many times last year, we’re feeling a bit burned out. Besides, with Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge opening next year, we figure Disneyland and Walt Disney World are going to be pretty busy for a while. We’ve decided it’s time to take some grown-up vacations.

The biggest plans we have are for my birthday. We’ll be going to Ely, Nevada, where I will get to drive a steam train at the Nevada Northern Railway Museum. We had hoped to do so this past year, but when multiple expensive disasters struck, we postponed those plans. This year is more of a milestone birthday anyway (my 50th!) so it’ll maybe be a little more special. 

I’ve also rediscovered my love for the British weekly comic 2000 AD, and through it I am finding other British comics to love. I have been subscribing to 2000 AD—the comics home to Judge Dredd—and the Judge Dredd Megazine since 2002, but occasionally real life has gotten in the way and I’ve fallen behind. Most recently—November 2016, to be exact—I hadn’t been reading the comics. For some reason, reading a weekly comic about a future America as a fascist state under an authoritarian regime, no matter how tongue in cheek it was meant, just didn’t feel entertaining any more. 

I'm hoping to read all of Nemesis the Warlock this year, even though the politics might hit a bit too close to home. Still.

However, I took advantage of the latest “jumping on” issue—an issue where every single story is the first part of a new story—to start reading again. I figure I can stay current from this point on, and gradually work though my unread issues until I get caught up again. I also took the opportunity to pull most of my unread collections of older stories from 2000 AD out of storage, as well as reading more recent collections. 

The reprint books I hauled out of storage

Also exciting for me: Rebellion (the gaming company that publishes 2000 AD) recently purchased the archives of pretty much every comic published in the UK, and have started reprinting a lot of those series under the imprint Treasury of British Comics. These feature stories in a wide variety of genres, from “girls” comics, which are basically science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories featuring female leads, to sports comics, to war comics like the classic WWI series Charley’s War, to animal comics. I recently read Marney the Fox, a series from a children’s comic about a fox, and it was one of my favorite comics I’ve read in a long time.

So I’ll probably be writing a bit about those comics. I really want to share my love of Marney the Fox with the world. I also read Rebellion’s first graphic novel in their revival of Roy of the Rovers, a beloved British football (soccer in the US) comic, and thought that was great. I also want to finally read a lot of the classic strips that I have enjoyed, but haven’t read in their entirety. So expect to see posts about comics like Strontium Dog, Nemesis the Warlock, Nikolai Dante, and, of course Judge Dredd.

I'm also hoping to read all of Slaine this year.

I’m also planning on using the smoker more this year, using the pickling supplies my wife got me last Christmas more, and using the beer making kit my father in law got me this Christmas. So you can expect to see some of that documented here. Right now, my plans include making another batch of bacon, making my own Canadian bacon, and making my own porchetta.

I smoked this pork chop on Christmas Eve.

Cooked this steak for myself Christmas Day

What else do I have coming up? To be honest, I’m not sure.. But I’m going to try to make it a fun, positive year, and hope to share those highs with you here.

I will continue to post on Sunday mornings, but I'm hesitant to post a specific frequency or goal. I don't want to reach the end of the year and feel like I've failed to reach the goal; I'd rather feel proud of what I manage to accomplish. I'm going to try to post at least twice a month, though. You can also follow me on Instagram at RumpleDumple, if you would like to see photos from me more frequently.

See you next time!