Fifteen years ago last night, I asked Char the single most important question of my life. And thank God she said yes. We started making wedding plans right off the bat, but a dead rabbit sped the process up, and in just a month and a day we'll celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary. We have plans for that, plans that don't include moping teenagers or an excited almost eleven year old, but that's getting ahead of ourselves.

Tonight, or last night actually, we celebrated having made the commitment on a New Year's Eve that was infinitely better than ones we'd spent in the past. To the rest of you it was ushering in of a new year, but to us it was an anniversary of getting it right, of me having the sense to ask and her doing me the honor of saying yes.

Brad watched Rachel and Kevin for us, and we went out to dinner, and then hit one of the better clubs to dance. It was a far different atmosphere than the company party we'd been at 15 years ago, quite a bit louder and more frenetic, but in a way that was better. In the middle of all those people drinking and dancing like tonight was the last night they'd ever have, we had a bubble of calm around us. We didn't go out with friends; we intentionally went out alone.

We could have stayed out all night, but shortly after midnight we both wanted to be home with our kids. Alex came home about the same time we did, and the other kids were still up, so Char made everyone hot chocolate and we spent an hour or so listening to them chatter about how they spent the night.

How you start a year can be a pretty good indicator of how you want to end the year; spending those first couple of hours with my family is definitely how I want to end this year.

The house is quite now; the kids have been asleep for hours and Char drifted off an hour or so ago. Even the dogs and cats are snoring.

I could sleep, I'm finally sleeping like a normal person, but for a while I just want to soak this up.

Happy New Year, friends and lurkers.