Happy New year and other such ramblings

Well Happy New Year everybody, I hope that you had a wonderful and fulfilling Christmas time as I for one tried my best to stay fully filled all through the Christmas break and now find myself about 5 pounds the happier because of it. Often the new year is a time that many people make resolutions and promise to quit smoking again or go back onto that diet for 2 days or other such silly things. In recent years I have elected instead to write out a few goals for the new year and this last year I actually kept the list to see how I was doing. In mid September while cleaning my office I found this list and looked over the 11 items I had written down and much to my surprise I was on track for 8 or so of them, with 1 or 2 being things that really had no concrete indicators but were rather subjective.

My biggest goal was to get healthier in Body, Mind and Spirit. I'm not really sure how you qualify success on this but due in part to the vehicle accident that I was in in August I have been forced to work out on a regular basis or I'm in a lot of pain; so I'm stronger than ever. This was also a very busy and hard year for me and that has actually helped me to grow into a stronger person, isn't it amazing how we end up growing through the hard times in our lives. The very first house Sonya and I ever bought was in the town of Asquith Saskatchewan, there was a man named Mr. Pickett who was well known in the town as the "ultimate gardener" or at least the best potato grower around. Well he had a stroke and we ended up buying his property in August of that year. So What does this have to do with anything, Wellllll Mr Pickets had a secret to his farming it was well rot manure!!! It doesn't take long for anything including weeds to grow in this stuff and to our misfortune he had brought in 2 truckloads of it the year before his stroke; the only down side was that no one had done anything in the garden all year and the weeds were well over waist height. Back to the question what does this have to do with anything, well I've learned in the past that the way to grow things well is to get "roots in the poop!" or said another way we grow the most through difficult circumstances so shitty times in life are actually God's way of building character in our lives.

On to this next year, My hope is that you and your family are blessed with a great year, and that if you run into difficult times that you will grow through them and come out the other end unscathed. Blessings to you and a happy new year.

Rodney