Happy New Year to Everyone!

This is the first New Years in a long time that I am not hungover, is this a sign that I am becoming an old woman?
This holiday season has been tough for me. I have never been much of a Cristmas person, but this year it made me sad not to be home for the holidays. I think a lot of if is just from being burned out on being away and living in Asia, and missing people and hobbies from back home. This year has been really good fro me in many ways, but above all it has reminded me of how important family and good friends are. Adventures are great, but without close relationships even an adventure is unfulfilling for me.
Working in Korea is starting to grate on me. My boss is quite possibly the dumbest person I have ever met. On Christmas Eve he told us we had to come in early in the morning for a meeting on Boxing Day (even though most poeple don't work until like 4). It was so painful to sit through his meeting which was barely comprehensible and completely contradictory. He is seriously like the George Bush of Korea, he speaks in sound bites, but none of the sound bites match. I have always been a pretty easy going person, but sometimes in this coutry I find myself full of rage and turing to an angry person. For example the other day at the gym I was stretching on the mat, but then a stretching class started. Now you can not be on the mat during a stretching class, which is really annoying because first, the mat is huge, and second I pay a ton to use this gym and feel like I should be able to stretch before my workout. On this particular day I was there before the class started and there were only 3 people taking the class and the man still kicked me off. I could feel the rage building up inside and felt as though flames might come out my eyes at any moment. Instead of yelling though, I decided to move my routine right next to the mat, performing my seated excercises on the floor. I purposely did this knowing it would horrify the Koreans, you just don't sit in the floor in Korea. I think I proved my point, but realized that all of this negative energy built up inside me is not good, and it's not who I am. A day later quite coincidentally I was reading my book and came across a quote by the Buddha which reminded me of these moments of rage I have been feeling lately. " Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned"
So to get to the point of this long drawn out story, I think my New Years resolution is to practice some of the things I learned in my meditation retreat. I am going to try to have loving-kindness (even for my boss) and make a real effort to let things go and just be mindful of my feelings and actions throughout the next three months. Thats right, three months baby!!!!
Oh and here are some pictures from our staff Christmas party.