Looking Back, Looking Ahead

Happy New Year to you, my dear blog readers! I hope you had a lovely year-end holiday. I really enjoyed my "time-out-of-time" to hang out with my family, watch a lot of movies, eat a lot of cookies and celebrate my forty-ninth birthday. In our house, the birthday girl or boy gets to rule big time, and I took full advantage of my privileges to force my family to go to brunch at Ella's in San Francisco where we breakfasted on orange-brandy French toast, fried cornmeal with onions and jalapenos, fluffy pancakes and waffles and a luscious fresh fruit plate. Then I decreed we go to the Museum of Modern Art to see several cool exhibits on wine and style, voyeurism, and Henri Cartier-Bresson's photographs. I do love art museums and always feel my consciousness is broadened by appreciating the works of artists in other media. After we got back home from our aesthetic enrichment, I made my famous rum mousse rice pudding as a stand-in for birthday cake. Dinner was deep-dish pizza from a new kid on the block, Little Star Pizza, which makes what I can only describe as an elegant pizza. The corn meal crust was delish, too. Then we broke open the Veuve Clicquot and watched The Godfather with an eye to all the continuity and historical errors as well as fascinating facts I learned from the annotated screenplay. The day was a pleasure from start to finish and even lingered on into sometime after midnight in the first hour of 2011.

The New Year encourages us to look back as well as forward, and one of the sparkling highlights of 2010 for me was my boudoir session with Laura Boyd. Laura blogged about my session yesterday, and I'm planning to give you more on my experience in the month ahead. I don't have any strict New Year's resolutions this year, but I do want to try to be in the moment, keep my mind and heart open, and write what I love in the year ahead. If you have some good resolutions to share, let me know and I might even steal them! Wishing you a New Year of peace, discovery and pleasure!