Ticket to Ride to San Juan

New Year's Eve is filled with traditions. Champagne, "Auld Lang Syne", and watching the ball drop in Times Square. For me, it's become sitting around playing board games with a few close friends. This year we played a couple of new ones. Ticket to Ride Europe is a fun game, combining my love of trains and travel and geography. You're given tickets, long and short routes, and your object is to build your route from one end to the other. And very likely someone else has the same idea, so you're jostling for position or putting in stations. One word of advice: Switzerland will be your downfall. The other thing is they're using the older spellings for some of the cities, so study the map carefully before it's covered with trains. The other game was San Juan, a card game with some odd variants. Basically build well and cleverly, using the cards at your disposal. I enjoyed both games.

I did actually watch most of the Tournament of Roses parade and the football games, but I spent most of New Year's cleaning and organizing. Mostly I focused on the paper and clutter. I need to get a strangehold on my finances this year, especially with the end of this job fast approaching. I also watched the first episode of the "Wonder Woman" tv series. Oh my stars and garters... Lynda Carter really did make that show.

I've joined embodiment to entice myself into doing more paper journaling. I own several Moleskines, but I usually wind up with smaller "theme journals". I'm very text oriented, so seeing all the collages and art journals is both inspiring and depressing.