The year be ticking away....

It's good to be home with nowhere to go for another couple days. Between Christmas and now we spent a full day in Debrecen with Agi's parents, where we recreated the Hungarian Christmas tree experience. Its awesome, in only an awesome way that Smokey the Bear can nervously appreciate. Take a little fir Christmas tree that is now thoroughly dried out and brittle. Tie a bunch of cheap Chinese fire sparklers to the branches. Light. Sing and take pictures, all while crossing your fingers that the sparks now shooting off the tree/kindling don't set it & the apartment on fire. AWESOME TRADITION! It was well worth the 4 hour round trip, particularly since I love love love being able to drive 110 MPH on the freeways here. Really had a lot of fun visiting with Agi's folks and her younger brother & fiance.

ON the 27th and 28th, I took the family to Zagreb, Croatia, where I had scheduled our company Christmas dinner for my Croatian office staff. This was an 8 hour round trip. We all went to a steakhouse outside Zagreb dedicated to all things "western" in the best US sense of the word. Restaurant was called Fort Apache, and was decorated in a period style best described as "1880's saloon". Everything paneled in wood, with animal heads on the walls, plank wood chairs and tables, and 42 oz porterhouse steaks. I was in heaven. As were our two vizsla's when we brought them back the bones the next day. Since we have a very small cozy apartment there (to save the company money on hotels for my frequent work trips) we all stayed overnight and the kids had a blast at the "adventure" of it. As did Agi.

The apartment itself is located in a 1970's-era HUGE communist apartment building, all cement. The apartment is on the 11th floor, with a great little view from the balcony of a soccer field and park. The apartment (all 500 square feet of it) was gutted and rebuilt before we took over it. Looks really nice inside! I've got to hand it to the Yugoslavian communists. They planned and built their commie-era housing a whole lot better than the Hungarians did. While the Hungarian buildings of this era all have very cramped lobbies and dark hallways (reminding me of what substandard public housing in Cabrini-Green must look like) this building has huge lobbies on each floor, lots of light, and they've been thoroughly updated with security cameras in all stairwells, lobbies, and elevators. Each floor is secured for just the residents on that floor, and each floor has its own locked entryways and access points. Very secure. We like. It was also built to withstand a 9.0 earthquake.

It's now 10 PM on Sunday night and I've wrapped up my last Sunday of the year. I've had to conduct our church services for the last two months. Had a bit of a scare today when my main speaker ended up in bed with a bad bad case of the cold. Thankfully his mission-companion wife roped in an elder to stand in, so I wasn't put into the awkward position of having to ad-lib for 20 minutes at the end of the meeting. The topics for the day were goal setting and procrastination, and dare-say I am a pro in this category. I've been telling myself for a while now that I need to prepare a couple of good solid talks and just always have them ready for situations just like this. I guess I'll do that in 2008. Promise :-) .

Andrew was the youth speaker (funny, how when your dad is in the branch presidency, you seem to be youth speaker a whole lot more often...) and did a good job. He talked about goal-setting for preparing for a mission.

We have our Branch New Year's Eve party tomorrow night at our BP's house. It's always fun & a cool tradition for us. We've got a great little branch here in Budapest. Agi's going to make her famous mashed potatoes for the party. SHe throws in just the right amount of milk, pepper, sour cream, and a little grated cheese. Never any leftovers.

Speaking of leftovers, I've been having fun mowing through our leftover Christmas ham. We tried to make the best reproduction of a Honey-Baked Ham that we could, and Agi got pretty darn close. She found a great recipe online for the honey-baste and we soaked that sucker good while it was cooking.

Hope the whole family had a great Christmas and WILL have a great new year. We love hearing from you guys, and we really enjoy reading your blogs. I love how technology helps us communicate so easily.

I'm in the process of making all the little additions to this page to get a little more personalized. I've been cribbing some of the better ideas from the other blogs I've seen. Hence the cool little bookshelf you now see to your right.

Love all you guys. Hope you enjoy our little musings on life, liberty (or lack thereof) and the pursuit of happiness in SE Europe. Aaron