Happy new year! I hope everyone enjoyed the holidays. Amy and I met my brother and Suzanne at the parent's place in Minnesota for New Year's. Each year Craig and Amy host a large New Year's Eve party they call the Dircks games. You can see photos from that if you click the photo above. Perhaps one year late, the theme was 007, so there was a whole casino setup for the guests' entertainment. So we rang in 2008 in style, hopefully a sign of good things to come. The rest of our time in Minnesota was spent either in front of a fire or bundled up in many layers of clothes. I always feel that when you're in MN in the winter, you should try to go for at least one walk on the lake. Unfortunately, by our last morning there we still hadn't made it out, so I found myself hiking out in -10 F weather as the sun was coming over the trees. It was quite pretty, and quite cold.