Traffic jams, wet mail and son's speeding fine - happy New Year!

Well hello to you, 2016! How will you be, I wonder, I dream...

If you're starting as you mean to go on, then for us, you are already shaping up to be a year of tedium, inconvenience and hair-pulling parental frustration, with but a few hours in delivering at least an hour of traffic standstill and a limp greeting awaiting us at home of a pile of wet bills, one of which was a speeding fine for a time and place when neither of us (the bill payers), were driving the car. Otherwise fine? Hopefully.

This dead tree photographed today on our way back from Opua in the north where we spent New Year's Eve with M's cousin's family, is not a classic symbol of hope, granted. But..., as we were stopped in a traffic jam at the time I took it, which enabled me to look more closely at its warped, bald beauty where I would have otherwise likely whizzed past at the usual highway rate, blissfully unawares, it could be seen as a symbol of looking on the bright side, and, if not exactly taking time to stop and smell the roses, then taking time to stop and look at death in a new light.

So let's toast to that, shall we? Let's make 2016 the year of looking at death - and so life - in a new appreciative light. Also, let's make it the year I get my first book published to rave reviews and record sales, shall we? We shall.