Just for kicks and giggles, I looked up my New Year’s Eve post from last year.  In said post, I outlined my hopes for 2009.  Some of those hopes came to fruition (Wes and I expanding our family) and some didn’t (My Dad’s cancer did not run away).

I would say, though, that even with my Dad’s passing and saying goodbye to Doc, we had a pretty good year.  I was blessed enough to get to take one more trip out to see my Dad before he passed away.  We found out that we’re expecting a super-cute baby boy and that pregnancy agrees with me.  Wes finished school and ended the year with a big certification exam victory.

I mean, yeah, this year was not free from speed bumps.  It was, however, a good year.  We still have our house, we have our health, we have our son (and his health), and we have each other and our families.  No, we still don’t have cable TV and it’s been awhile since we took a vacation, but shoot.  Life is good, and I’m not complaining.

That being said, I still have hopes for 2010.  It’s a whole new decade, you know.  At this time ten years ago, I was a 14 year old girl who had just moved to Washington with her mom and her mom’s creepy boyfriend.  I spent New Year’s Eve on the computer, listlessly waiting for someone to sign on to AOL Instant Messenger so I could chat with someone.  Anyone.

Ten years later, I have a rakishly handsome husband, a very busy baby boy kicking my ribs, and a bottle of Martinelli’s with my name on it.  We’re staying in this year due to my propensity for degrading into a toddler after 11 pm, and I have no doubt we’ll have a splendid time doing it.

Here are my hopes for 2010:

• A healthy baby and a safe delivery of said baby.
• A good job for Wes.
• A strong finish in school and good job for my brother.
• The ability to endure the 30 Day Shred with Wes once the baby’s here.
• To ring in the New Year next year having lost all my baby weight.
• An excellent year for my company, including a successful site re-launch and doubled traffic.
• A tenable solution for what I’m going to do at work next year when the baby’s here.

Much like with last year, I have no idea how these hopes will shake out.  Some may happen, some probably won’t.  The nice thing is, it’s a whole new year.  There’s nothing but the opportunity for great things to come.  I look forward to seeing what’s ahead, and though I know there will of course be challenges to overcome, there will be joy too.

What do you hope for next year?

Sorry about not posting yesterday.  You see, I was too busy celebrating.  With my handsome husband.  Who just so happened to freaking rock the heck out his huge exam yesterday.

That’s right, he met his foe on the battlefield, pitted his wits against it, and emerged victorious with a nearly perfect score.  Take that, Microsoft certification exam!

Now that this exam is behind him, Wes can officially start looking for work as a software developer because not only is he now qualified as a software developer, he also has the credentials to back it up.  He wants to take five more exams after this one so that he’s qualified as a super-hero developer or somesuch, but this was the big one and he nailed it.

We spent the day at the super-fancy mall around here, soaking up the revelry and commerce, and then went to see Avatar in 3D.  It was a really fun movie to watch, but either my eyes are broken or the projectors were slightly out of focus because a lot of the movie just looked kind of blurry.

Needless to say, I’m really going to enjoy watching the movie again on DVD.  When I won’t spend half the movie closing my eyes to avoid the blur, and where I won’t miss crucial parts of the plot because of my many bathroom breaks.

Now we are left with wonderful things to celebrate.  We’re making a special dinner of beef-ale stew with green onion buttermilk dumplings for dinner in honor of it being Christmas Eve and all, we’re spending all day tomorrow with his family to celebrate Christmas, and then on Monday we get to sneak a peek at what our little Squishy is up to.

Seriously, life doesn’t get much better than this.

Do you remember when I wrote yesterday about my poor frozen washing machine?  Well.  Last night it had the equivalent of the 24 hour flu, what with the vomiting and mess and horror, but now it’s all back to normal and running in tip top shape.

Last night though.  *shudder*  Wes was able to get the hoses leading from the wall-mounted faucets to the washer thawed, but the washer was still unable to get the water to come through.  We concluded this was because something inside the washer was frozen.

To combat this, we decided to run a load of laundry with hot water manually poured into the washer.  This actually worked quite well, and after a rocky start the washer was soon thawing out and humming along quite well.

We congratulated each other and went inside to cook dinner.

Never in our wildest imaginings could we ever have conceived to check to see if the drain hose was likewise frozen.

Oh but it was.  I went out to check the washer and there was an error message in the little digital window and bright white cheerful suds were flowing from the bottom of the washer door onto the garage floor.  The door clicked unlocked and, because I’m curious, I opened the door.

The bloody great deluge!

In case you’re curious?  If your washing machine starts flashing you ominous error messages and clutching its stomach while saying it’s going to throw up?

Whatever you do, make sure it’s not opening that door.

Unless you have a large bucket handy.  Or just really want to wash your floor with laundry detergent.

Wes was, of course, watching the whole debacle.  This was unfortunate because I happened to be wearing his shoes at the time and it’s entirely possible they wound up as collateral damage thanks to my delay at dodging the great flood of cleanliness.

We wound up with a garage floor that looked like this:

On the plus side, Wes' car's tires were mountain fresh...

Because my husband is awesome, he tackled the clean-up (I was excused because of my difficulty at reaching the ground) while I finished dinner.  Wes, being the intrepid troubleshooter he is, refused to give up hope on the washer and, after two more cycles with hot water, was able to defrost the drain pipe and effectively resuscitate our washer.

The question for us now is, what do we do about our garage?  In the four years we’ve owned the house, the garage has never gotten so cold that the washer’s frozen up.

All that’s changed now, so what do we do?  Do we insulate our garage?  Buy a space heater for laundry day?  Wrap our hoses with heat tape and insulation?

These are all big homeowner questions, none of which can be solved with martinis or cookies.  Unacceptable.