Well, we made it home. Carol had to drive the last half - I was getting too tired.

A subdued evening, but still a good time. I love our New Year's get-togethers. I love to see (and taste!) everything that everyone made for the evening. It's always good quality, it's always well thought out (never just slapped together thoughtlessly at the last moment). Good eatin'!

One of the major differences this year is that we never watched a movie - we actually put on Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve at 9pm, way before anything was happening.

Of course, we had to wait to see the return of Dick Clark. He had a stroke on December 6, 2004, just weeks before last year's show.

He sat at a desk inside the ABC studios at Times Square. It was a bit startling to see. He looked great, but his voice is impaired and he didn't gesture with his right hand at all. His voice isn't exactly the same and his breathing is forced. But, later in the show, as he relaxed a bit, you can here the quality of his old voice was still there, but his enunciation just wasn't there. As he said "Last year I had a stroke. It left me in bad shape. I had to teach myself how to walk and talk again. It's been a long, hard fight. My speech is not perfect but I'm getting there."

Being on the show tonight was clearly a goal he set for himself and he made it. As he said: "I wouldn't have missed this for the world."

The question is - should he continue on? His speech is nowhere near where it should be for an announcer... and it just felt... "uncomfortable"... to listen to him. At times, he has almost impossible to understand. At others, clear as a bell, just raspy.

And I don't know if anyone else caught this, but I thought that during the countdown he skipped a bunch of numbers, like he couldn't count backwards.

Well, after the East Coast celebrations, we turned to our next annual item: making fun of what people wear on our local coverage. None of the women at Channel 7 looked good. None of the women at any of the events Channel 7 covered looked good - except for all of the women that were at the bars up and down Clark street in Wrigleyville (just blocks away from where we were!)

Buffy got a small birthday cake for me from Dinkel's (oh, Yum!) (yes, my birthday is coming up on the 4th)

I love hangin' out and celebrating the New Year. I'd love to see the new year being better than the last!