Wednesday Weekend Wind-Up: New Year's Weekend

With Christmas Eve falling on a Monday this year, we had Tuesday off for Christmas Day, which made for a nice, short week. Work was quiet since so many people are off this time of year. Friday, we were able to head home a few hours early, so we decided to head downtown to eat at Nada for the last meal out of 2018. This is one of our fave Mexican places around town, but mostly due to the location, we don't make it down there very frequently [Francisco hates downtown parking.]. It's also a little pricier than similar restaurants, and I still hold a grudge that their Happy Hour is limited to bar customers only.  We probably would have each gotten a margarita instead of sharing one otherwise lol. We had the Queso Gringo, Robuchon Truffled Potatoes, and the Sweet Chili Glazed Nada Fries. For dessert, Francisco had the Churros, and I had the Butterscotch Flan. 

Even though Christmas was over, we swung by the Zapf’s Christmas Display.

Since we would have to work on New Year's Eve, we decided we would have our at-home NYE celebration on Saturday instead. The highlight of this is it's basically the one day a year I can convince Francisco to do tequila shots with me and play Glee Karaoke lol.

We also played games like Scattergories, Lego Creationary, iKNOW Trivia, etc. We made cocktail shrubs for the first time. We had tried this type of drink before at a local restaurant and thought it would be interesting to try at home, so we thought this made for a nice occasion to try this vinegar-based cocktail.  We had a simple cheese plate for lunch, and overall, it was an enjoyable day. 

We worked a short day on Monday, New Year's Eve. We were going to go out to eat, but we decided it was raining too much to be worth it. Francisco spent most of the afternoon in the kitchen prepping some cinnamon rolls for New Year's Day breakfast.  We did make time to watch New Year, New You on Hulu, and even stayed up a little past 9:00 PM to finish it haha. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                             

And because we hadn't indulged enough, he also made a Peppermint Bundt Cake for dessert.  

We played a lot of Overcooked 2 and watched Naked and Afraid because that was easier than going down the path of arguing over which movie we could both agree on. 

As I reflected on 2018, it left me feeling disappointed in how the year went and kind of frustrated in how to better plan for the future. I realized that we had closed out the year without having a single person come out to visit us and that really bummed me out. We've had talks about this in the past and come to the conclusion that it was probably best to adjust our expectations. But that's a bitter pill to swallow, to give up the idea of having better-balanced relationships with the people we value in our lives. To understand that the only way to continue fostering those relationships is if we keep putting the effort in. Also, I feel like I've been whining about this for a while, and I'm annoying myself, so I'm sure I've annoyed others, so I'm going to try to not dwell on it so much. It's not helping anything. 

I thought about New Year's resolutions, but I'm not really sure what to do to make things better. Broadly speaking, I think my goal for this year is to try to slow down and enjoy things a little more. I tend to keep myself busy but I still realllly value my downtime. I've started to realize how much of my anxiety revolves around time and feeling like I never have enough. That just sets me on a spiral of obsessing over how little time there is to get things done, which makes me irritable and I feel like I don't enjoy everything as much when I always have one eye on the clock. 

I honestly just don't know what to expect of 2019, but I'm trying to stay positive.