*The Guildhall in Derry, Northern Ireland, is a guildhall in which the elected members of Derry City and Strabane District Council meet. The building, which was designed by John Guy Ferguson and financed by The Honourable The Irish Society, was completed in 1890. The design for the clock tower was modelled on the Elizabeth Tower in London.

Joyce and I had commandeered the Walled City in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, in the summer of 2016. We had cannons pointed at the revelers below, though neither that nor the impending rain did nothing to dampen their enthusiasm. We made sure we were on the side of the train on the ride back to Coleraine to get a good view of Downhill Beach… we had good memories with sweet Irish friends there. As soon as we reached that point, the skies opened with a brilliant double-rainbow… it left us with yet another good memory.

Things have been blowing up in our neighborhood over the last 24 hours… New Year’s revelers. We need some more cannons like these to keep them at bay! I had the onset of a bad cold yesterday that I treated with Zicam, which is aggravating in one respect. Then, our wireless high-speed router decided to show itself by becoming a low-speed router… the firmware seemed corrupted, likely due to intermittent power outages from recent hurricanes and snowstorms. The router had gone crazy, making it nearly impossible to gain access to it and download new firmware. That nearly drove me crazy, but I did find a way to work around it, as I’m the IT guy around here. I completed the repair at around the stroke of midnight and skyrockets started going off around here. I’ve never had a job so celebrated… or internet that’s run so fast, as I tweaked it a bit. Dynamic QoS was available with the new firmware. If you have it available on your router and your Internet speed is 250 Mbps or less, be sure to select it. It doesn’t make the speed faster, it just makes better use of the given speed in throughput. I celebrated my 64th birthday a few days back on December 30… I’m the oldest nerd I know of.

I hope all of this is what the new year will be like… we’ve not made specific plans, but we will likely have more places to explore this year to make new memories with new friends. There will be bumps in the road along the way, starting next week for me with surgery – septoplasty with turbinate reduction – fun! The result of a misspent youth, football and such, but I’ll get over it and I’ll be able to breathe better. I’m sure there will be many more “bumps” this year. We will get through them and understand what blessings they were to help us better appreciate the high points I know are coming our way this year, too, just like rainbows after a gray day.

The Zicam actually worked. For as miserable as I was yesterday, I was much better today, so we took our young Chinese friends (he’s working on a Ph.D. in church history at Duke) to see the new Grinch movie. They had no idea what a Grinch was… I told them it was a monster movie. Joyce laughed, and they knew something was up. The movie surprised me! It contained music from the original 1966 cartoon, as well as words straight from Dr. Seuss’ book… and a mix of both secular and Christian Christmas carols, which I did not expect. It was quite funny and sweet… and I want a dog like Max! It’s always good to start the new year on a high note, much higher than I would have figured yesterday. I couldn’t have picked three sweeter folks for company today, including my wife. I hope your coming year is filled with high notes to savor.