Wow, the older I get, the more time seems to fly. Seriously, where did 2017 go?

We held our 14th Annual Blankenheim New Years Pig Roast last night – the first in our new home! It was a great time with a lot of old faces and some new ones too! The dogs were in their element – they hung out all day in the yard and made a lot of new friends. I’m sure the fact that they were being fed all sorts of people food helped too!

Every year is a bit different, and as we’ve gotten older we’ve done less of the shots at 2am and more of the 9pm New York new years. This year, everyone left around 11pm and by midnight it was just us two:

I hope you all have a wonderful 2018 – I’m looking forward to everything it brings!

As always, we had our annual New Year’s pig roast. I’m pretty sure that even if I didn’t send out an Evite, people would still show up at my house. This was the 12th year and I have a feeling we’ll be doing it forever!

The day starts with the dressing of the pig in the morning – once it’s all stuffed with potatoes and other yummy spices, it’s put on the spit and starts cooking.

This pig was a little bit smaller than we’ve done in the past couple years – so it went on around 10am rather than earlier in the day.

After the pig goes on, we wait. People stop by all day to check in on it and enjoy the “cracklins” – basically the tasty skin that starts to form as it cooks. Mike has a special marinade that he pours on throughout the day that makes it taste even better!

Finally it’s time to cut the pig up. It’s quite the process that requires skilled butchers… or just a bunch of dudes with electric knives.

We had a blast this year, as always. We never really know how many people are going to be there, and every year it’s a great mix of people we’ve seen every year and new faces. Our friends and family all bring side dishes and we get to sample all sorts of amazing cooking! We celebrated both the New York (9pm) countdown as well as our own west coast countdown. It was a wonderful time!

Well friends, welcome to 2014!

Last night we held our annual New Years Eve party, complete with pig roast. My husband and family are getting really good at this pig roasting process… this was arguably one of the better ones we’ve done!

This year was one of the mellower years (with age comes wisdom?) but it was still great to spend time with our friends and family and to share a delicious meal! We celebrated both the New York (9pm here) and midnight ball drops. We could only find the live New York feed on the Spanish channel again this year… and by 9pm it was pretty hilarious to hear everyone trying to remember their high school Spanish and to actually count backwards in it.

I hope you all had as much fun as I did and that you have a wonderful year! I can’t wait to see what 2014 brings!

A happy New Year it was indeed! We had a fantastic time celebrating with our friends and family! As is our customary tradition, we roasted a pig.

The number of people that we have seems to vary by year. We had somewhere between fifty and sixty this time around. This year we celebrated a New York new years and a California new years. I thought for sure that we would be the only ones left at midnight, but surprisingly, there were still a decent amount of people!

Little miss Chloe made her first party appearance – and did really well with all the people and noise!

It really was a great time! Maybe too much of a good time… both Mike and I have been feeling the effects today! Thank goodness we both had the day off! Head on over to my Facebook page if you want to check out more pictures from the party!