... and a Happy New Year!

Guest Commentary by, Ashlee

While the holidays may be coming to a close for most of our friends and family back in America, they keep on rolling for Scott and I! Tonight will be a lovely celebration of the New Year (I'm already forgetting to write 2011 on documents) with dinner at the Turkish restaurant and festivities at Brian's or Justin's involving the consumption of every bit of leftover Christmas cookie and candy within our grasp. We might partake in a little Mongol Sparkling Wine as well :)

We'll be up bright and early New Year's morning (before most of you reading this have even rung in the new year) getting on a flight to UB; please keep your fingers, toes, and eyes crossed that the weather cooperates with us! We heard that the negative-40s are coming with their friends the snow flurries and winds of high magnitude :/ After that, it will be a few days lounging about INSIDE before heading out to THAILAND!! the land of high humidity (my skin will be happy, but will I? Yes. Yes I believe I will.) and 85* weather. I've been trying to convince Scott to shed his "light" winter coat before heading to the airport as we don't want to lug around said "light" coat in THAILAND. Maybe a ya'll can help me out?

You can see my previous post about what we're getting up to in THAILAND here. This is where we're celebrating the next set of holidays: our birthdays!! Thank you to everyone who helped make it happen (all our wonderful, doting parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles), get ready for an extra special THAILAND edition of the Sunday night slideshow brought to you by Scott Burt Productions, due out sometime July 2011... You might see a preview for it before the next Harry Potter film (speaking of which, we're hoping to see HP7.1 in UB this Sunday!!).

We'll be back in Olgii just in time for a slow Februray (Kazakhs don't generally celebrate the Mongolian "New Year" of Tsaagan Sar) and a raucous March (St. Patricks and Naoyriz, the Kazakh New Year celebrated on or around the Spring Equinox). This will be my first Naoyriz, but you can see what its like from Scott's post about it last year here.

I'll leave you with a bit of something close to joy for New Years: