Happy New Year!

I hope you all have a great 2009! 2008 turned out to be a year of changes and international travel and food for me. A short recap before the year is gone in less than 24 hours: I made international trips to Costa Rica (monkeys and crocodiles), Ecuador (volcanoes and rainforest), Vancouver (Pacific Ocean and Chinatown), and South Africa (winelands, Cape of Good Hope, and Table Mountain); the long and nervous process before Obama was elected president; growing chili peppers in our garden and burning wood in our furnace for the first time; lots of good food and food writing; some excellent reading; and trips within New Jersey (Sourland Preserve, Cape May, Brigantine, Ellis Island, Willowwood Arboretum, Pine Barrens, Grounds of Sculpture), Pennsylvania (New Hope Auto Show), and of course our big summer trip to Vermont and Maine. I started to use Flickr for my photos, and my most viewed photo is, unpredictably, a wine label with a stinkbug. AREA cut her hair short and colored it red, our cats kept their fluffy tails, my sister (EH) and mom (AnS) visited us, as well as several of our great friends. PP and I discovered the authors James Lee Burke and John Sandford (I know, crime novels and maybe not literature of the Nobel prize kind, but works great for the commute to work). Our favorite NJ restaurant is still Sergeantsville Inn, and our favorite US restaurant is probably TJ Buckleys in Brattleboro, Vermont, but we had many good meals at other places and we cooked lots of good local, organically grown food at home too. The weather was freaky with ice storms, floods, flowering dandelions at Christmas, and droughts in the summer (= no chanterelles in the forests here). The giant alpha male ground refused to be caught in our trap, and the moles ate all our beets (as usual, gardening posed its challenges). In the world and here in New Jersey the financial markets collapsed, Israel bombed Gaza, and no peace in sight in Iraq and Afghanistan either. But I am still hopeful for Peace on Earth, but then I suffer from perpetual hopefulness. After January 20, when Obama takes the reigns, things will be different, finally. I am keeping my fingers crossed.

Happy New Year to all of you, and let's hope for the best for the Earth and its people for 2009.