Raining In The New Year

Good morning everyone.  I won't lie to you, I'm pretty excited about welcoming 2013 into my life.  I sit here doing my last blog entry of 2012 in San Marcos, America while we have a light drizzle outside, but after the severe drought that Texas experienced a couple of years ago, I honestly never mind seeing the rain.  All signs point to my last night of work in 2012 being very busy, as it seems that every single regular customer that I have spoken to has plans to stop by Harper's/Slackers/The Veranda to celebrate the first hours of the new year...  In a strange and pleasant twist of fate, I have not been scheduled to work tomorrow, the day which happens to be serving up SIX college bowl games...  :)  As I have said here recently, my holiday trip to Las Vegas will provide the material for many blog entries to come, so be looking for that in the near future.

I want to welcome those of you who are just finding my little blog.  'The View From Bikini Hill' was born on September 28th, 2011, and the total viewcount is currently at 19,290 clicks.  I am extremely confident that 'Bikini Hill's' readership is going to skyrocket in the near future, so I wanted to take a second to let you know what to expect here.  I am currently making an entry on every weekday, and I'll sometimes make a random post on weekends.  On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursday I write about random topics, and these entries are normally what I like to call "rambles" - these posts encompass several topics.  You will get to experience my sarcasm, my sense of humor (debatable), get an insight into my personal life, learn about San Marcos, America, and get my viewpoints on all sorts of subjects.  On Wednesdays I write about poker and things related to Las Vegas, and on Fridays I write about sports.  During football season, the Friday posts are almost totally composed of football predictions, and I am about to start predicting the final scores of all of the NFL playoff games each week, an area in which I did remarkably well last year when it came down to picking winning and losers (and coming VERY CLOSE to a lot of the final scores).  If you are indeed one of my new readers, please feel free to go back into the archives to get a better idea of what 'Bikini Hill' is about.  I have posted over 200 times now in just under a year and a half, so there is plenty for you to catch up on.  Please feel free to comment on anything that you read here - I think that the participation of my readers just makes the blog better.

For those of you who have been regular readers on 'Bikini Hill', I want to thank you again for your patronage.  The list of blogs to the right will direct you to quality material written by friends that I have come to know since I have started babbling here in cyberspace, and the writers showcased there represent a significant portion of my original following.  Also, for any of you who are reading this right now, I also plan to become more active on my twitter account in 2013, and my 'handle' is listed at the top of this page.  There have been many things that have made my facebook page which haven't made the blog, and I plan on including more of those things in my twitter account also.

Back to the future now, my resolution for 2013 is to stay active.  When I was teaching and coaching (nine years experience at the high school level), I was busy beyond belief, to the point that I did not have a personal life.  I was CONSTANTLY making lists of things that I needed to get done, but one thing that did happen was that I DID get a lot accomplished.  Although I do love having more control over my life, I don't want to feel that I'm being idle this year - I want everything that I do to have a purpose.  Last year my resolution was to "trust my reads" - I feel that I did a good job of that, analyzing situations and acting on the conclusions that I reached.  For this year I want to be more like the Matthew Fox character in the movie 'Alex Cross' - it's not that I want to be a villain (and for those of you who don't know me yet, I am TRULY one of the "good guys"), but the Fox character always seemed focused, like he was getting something accomplished...  ;)

I will be back tomorrow with my first post of 2013, but in the meantime, I hope that all of you end 2012 on a positive note, and that you ring in the new year safely.  Have a great day and I will see you again tomorrow!