Tonight we celebrate the year’s end with friends at Oddfellas Cantina in Floyd, enjoying good food and listening to the always-excellent music of Bernie Coveney, Chris Luster and other musicians who will join them on stage before Rob Neukirch’s restaurant closes for its annual sojourn for the month of January.

The end of the year approaches at breakneck speed. Anyway you look at it, 2005 moved quickly. The year that began in the aftermath of the Pacific tsunami and saw the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and the divisive war in Iraq ends with more questions than answers, more anxiety than hope, and more trepidation than determination.

For Amy and I, the year brought changes in attitude along with changes in latitude (with apologies to Jimmy Buffett) – our first year completely away from the hustle and bustle of Washington.

Talk about a senior moment (or week or month or year). It just occurred to me (doh!) that only three days (counting today) remain in 2005.

Where the heck did the year go? Did we buy this house a year ago? If we’ve been here a year why do we still have boxes left to unpack in the garage? Why are some walls still bare?

After deciding to relocate permanently to Southwestern Virginia we toyed with building a new home on farmland we own in Carroll County but, instead, purchased an existing home near Floyd. After watching the trials and tribulations of David and Gretchen St. Lawrence with their homebuilding project we’re damn glad we did.

David St. Lawrence has been blogging about our cats and the corporate structure that felines employ when they take over a household (as all cats do) and how they have reacted with the introduction of David and Gretchen’s two animals during their stay with us while their new house is completed in Floyd County.