Happy New Year!

Hello Everyone, Happy 2008!

We're back and for lack of better New Year's Resolutions, do vow to update the blog more often. It'll definitely be different types of content, now that we're settled in one place for a while, however, we should still have lots to talk about.

As a New Year's gift, we were hired by an outdoor store called Snowgum. This is my first retail position, ever and I have to say that I'm quite nervous about starting work next week. Snowgum sells the type of gear that people will find useful when they travel and partake in outdoor activities. There's some camping stuff, some travel stuff, and many thoughtful things that one would need to take a trip. They even sell a drain plug for the bathroom sink so you can do wash while traveling. Funny how you'd never think to take your own drain plug while traveling, but it would have proved very useful in a number of places. We found that in lieu of this handy item, a plastic grocery bag shoved down the drain does the trick. Anyhow, we'll be working at Snowgum until the end of February.

Then we head down to Blenheim to work for Nobilo Wine Group as cellar hands for their 2008 harvest. I'm pretty excited about this, because, first of all, it's a foot in the door to the wine industry, one which we've enjoyed hanging around since we started our trip and secondly because it'll let me know whether or not I like wine enough to pursue a career in it when I get back to the States. Speaking of the States, we'll be returning after the harvest in May. We're not really sure what a "cellar hand" does, but I seem to remember seeing an episode of "Dirty Jobs" on the Discovery Channel, where Mike Rowe visits a winery and performs many of the dirtier tasks. What we do know, though is our employer supplies us with overalls and boots. Fun!

It's kind of funny to look back on 2007 and realize that January 1, 2007 is the day that Jesse and I vowed that by the end of the year we'd be doing something "drastically different" that probably involved quite a bit of travel. But at that point, we had no idea of what it would take or how much we'd learn selling/renting/packing up everything we own and taking off to travel the world. I'm not sure that what we do in 2008 could top this, but there's a good possibility that coming back to "civilization" and finding a place to live, finding employment, buying a car again, may be just as challenging.

For 2008, we've promised each other that at the end of this year, we're going to have at least defined the criteria for our work/life balance, attempting to find the location and employment that suits us both.

I'm definitely looking forward to the coming year and the events contained within, especially the marriage of my sister, Lindsay, to my arch training rival and good friend, Chris Wells. You can see their wedding website here. I'm hoping that preparing for marriage (a big deal) will distract CW from his strict training regiment and actually allow me to beat him. Yeah, he usually beats me, but SHHHHH, don't tell him I ever admitted to that.

Cheers!
~S