Hello January, and debate

I was going to post a bit about New Year's, but in the end I couldn't be bothered, mostly because I was overwhelmed with an extreme feeling of apathy on New Year's Eve. Apathy mixed with incomprehension that it was time to move on to a new year once again. When we were out lighting fireworks, I felt like I was just going through the motions, as if we couldn't actually do New Year's on the 31st, so we were doing our fireworks when we could, even though, of course, everyone else was doing theirs as well. Oh well, I suppose it's better than last year when I was all depressed.

January is shaping up already to be a very busy month. Every weekend is being filled with one party or another. This is mostly due to the proliferation of people I know with January birthdays. Before moving here, I knew one person who was born in January. Now, I can think of 4 friends, 2 family, and 3 people at work with birthdays this month. January is the new October.

In the past few weeks I've been starting to think a bit about when and where we want to go for trips this year. We already plan to go to the US again, and we'll road trip from Portland to San Francisco. And then O came up with the idea of going to Iceland. I want to go to Lake Como in northern Italy, but O has issues with Italy. I'd like to go for a holiday, even if it's a short one, in March or April, but I'm not sure yet if we'll go to Iceland then. Thankfully I got this book for Christmas, so we can get lots of ideas of where to go if we get stuck thinking of someplace on our own.

We're having timing issues though with the trip to the US. I think we'd like to go for 2 1/2-3 weeks, in the late spring/early summer. I was thinking June would be good, but there is the World Cup then, and while I'm not a big football fan, it was fun to be a part of 4 years ago, and in the US they hardly know it's even going on, so coverage there is slim. So I thought maybe mid-July instead, after the World Cup is over. But there is the issue of my cousin's wedding. She's my oldest cousin (of the ones I grew up with) and I was fairly close to her growing up, especially since we were the only girls, but I'm not that close to her anymore and I don't particularly want to go to her wedding. Which is in early August. In the LA area. So if we went to the US in July, and went to Portland first, as we plan to do, we'd then be getting down to San Francisco probably around the time of the wedding, or just before it. My family (well, namely my cousin's dad) thinks it should be no problem then to pop down to LA from SF for the wedding. I think any explanation I give for not going to the wedding when we're "right there" in SF would just sound like a thin excuse, so we can't go in July, no matter how much time there might be between our preferred date of departure for Amsterdam and the wedding. It's too close to not look like we're trying to get out of it.

My next idea was to go in late May into early June. Then I remembered that Sleater-Kinney are touring around Europe in late May, so that's out. I put the idea of April to O and he said that's too much in the middle of spring for him. Puh. So it'll probably be June, since football is not that important to me to make it that difficult on myself. I'll probably still get questions from my family about why I couldn't have pushed the trip to just a few weeks later, but they'll just have to live with it.