Ending 2005/Starting 2006 Right

Before 2005 officially ended, my family and I did something that is usually reserved for big gatherings such as Christmas and Thanksgiving.

We prayed together.

We stood in a circle in our living room with the TV muted and our still-up Christmas tree lit and thanked the Lord for being there for us in 2005. We gave thanks to Him for pulling us through another year. We did this only minutes before 2005 ended and after we finished our prayers, we got our drinks together and got ready to ring in the New Year.

The prayer was especially needed after we had a scare on New Year's Eve. That night, in our kitchen, condensation suddenly appeared on the ceiling with much of it in the one of the spots that fell when our roof got messed up years ago. Naturally, this made us very worried. Given that it took years for us to get the roof (and the ceilings) fixed, it would've been terrible if that problem suddenly reoccurred.

I hoped and thought that the culprit wasn't water seeping into the house but condensation from the multiple pots my mom had boiling in our kitchen earlier that night. She made greens and black-eyed peas that we ended up eating on New Year's Day. The pots she used were pretty big and it made the kitchen pretty hot. In fact, when I entered the house with our dinner for New Year's Eve (delicious Aurelio's Pizza), my glasses fogged up...even though it was not very cold outside.

Fortunately, my assumption turned out to be correct as my dad checked out the gutters and roof and found that everything was pretty good. Given that the water only showed up in the kitchen (and the doorway right by the kitchen), we could pretty much assume that the big-time boiling (and our lack of a hood or fan to remove the vapors) was to blame.

A near-miss like that to end 2005 (along with some other things that happened in 2005) definitely made thanking the Lord for the soon-to-end year very important. I think it might just become a new New Year's tradition.