Happy New Year!

Welcome to 2008! For me, 2007 was a year marked by a tremendous amount of personal and professional growth, and I'm looking forward to continuing that trend in 2008. There's a lot going on right now, and I'm trying to figure out how to best balance work and home life.

The holiday season was a lot of fun. Lots of time with family, taking it easy. Lauren isn't exactly hankering to go mountain biking or hang gliding lately, so I've been spending a lot of time trying to get the house in shape, with my old friend Home Depot. (Really, I should just buy stock...) Over the break, I repainted our downstairs bathroom (twice) and put in a new faucet. It doesn't sound like much, but that bathroom was in really bad shape. The bottom half of the room was painted a deep blue, and the top half white. There was a border right on the white/blue dividing line with a bunch of lighthouses and stuff on it. Would have been perfect for a beach house in Fire Island, but this is a main floor bathroom in a 5-bedroom house in Holtsville.

Since the blue was so deep, it needed two coats of primer after sanding. And then it took three coats of paint. Then Lauren decided she didn't like the color, so I put another three coats of a different color on. Then there was the white trim. Lots of work. (BTW, someone remind me not to use cheap rollers next time. There was a lot of lint that ended up on the wall.)

I also did quite a bit of work around the garage - a couple new shelving units and some shuffling of boxes and stuff, so we could put all the Christmas decorations back and accommodate some boxes of stuff from the Wading River house. Really, though, there's no substitute for a two-car garage.

I did a once-over on the truck, too. Wash, wax and vacuum after an oil change and changing out the air filter. Anyone know where the fuel filter is on a Dodge 1500 pickup? I wasn't able to locate an inline filter, and someone told me you need to drop the tank to get to it, but I'm not sure that info is from a reliable source.