Hello, all. I wish I had some good excuse for making this my first post of 2007, but I don't.

The wife and I continued our War Against New Year's Eve by staying home. She was asleep before Ryan Seacrest could pry the last scrap of confetti out of his product-coated hair, but I couldn't sleep and instead watched a couple of episodes of No Reservations. One was the show Bourdain did while writing a magazine article that later turned up in The Nasty Bits, so that was an interesting bit of recursion to kick off the new year. It's a pretty good show, and I find that I'm getting used to his prickish personality. Not sure if that's for the best or not.

New Year's Day saw us start our next bit of significant work on the house, as we demoed the living room in preparation for an overhaul. Took out the trim and moldings, removed the tiled ceiling (about half of which came down on its own in a cartoon-like moment, but without anyone getting hit in the head), opened up a doorway the previous owner had covered up, and tore down the plaster and lathe from one wall (there was some damage, and it'll allow us to add insulation as it's the wall that's on the side of the house).

To be fair, "we" was predominantly my sister-in-law's boyfriend. I mostly did the three things I do best - hold things, clean up, and stand around waiting to be told what to do. Having seen a few of the things, though, I think I could do more the next time we do something like this. Just not a whole lot more.

Oh, we also took out the carpet and found that we do have a decent wood floor. There's hope that it can be refinished, which would be nice.

I do have pictures, which I'll put up somewhere as we go along.