New Year's Eve

For New Year's Eve this year, we headed to the cheap cinema to take in the movie Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, which was amusing. The drama at the end dragged on a bit long for me (and for Lydia) but the animation was amazing and the story cute.

Then we used my iPhone's geocaching app and searched for and found(!) 2 geocaches near our home. Geocaching is a great family activity for us, I plan to make sure we do more of it this year. For those curious about what it is, it's a bit like a treasure hunt. People hide caches (sometimes just a paper log to record you found it, sometimes a larger container that holds small trinkets as well as a log) and then record their GPS coordinates and clues at geocaching.com.  You can use the free account (which we use) or a paid account (which has more features.)  Other than a GPS, you really don't need anything but a sense of adventure and good eyes!

I prefer the caches that are hidden in natural settings, don't like the ones that are near traffic (although the 2 we found on NYE were both near traffic), and refuse to search for those hidden at people's homes in their yards.

In the past, we've only searched for geocaches, but this year we plan to hide a few of our own. I've put aside some supplies to make that happen, and will update when we've created and hidden our first cache.

After geocaching, we headed home -- played some video games and ate a bunch of appetizers for dinner.  We rang in the New Year with the boys drinking sparkling grape juice and then sent them off to bed.

It was a simple, quiet day and evening -- but fun all the same!