As you are most likely aware, another year has recently been put to rest. Rest in peace 2016, thank you for your time. If you were not aware of this, I apologize for the spoiler, and would recommend you place “get a friend” towards the top of your list of resolutions for 2017. If your personality or lack of personal hygiene (or perhaps both) renders that particular resolution unlikely, replace it with “acquire a calendar”. Wait a minute… my mom gives me a Lignite Community Calendar every year for Christmas. So it goes.

After our New Year’s celebration this year, I put “avoid champagne” at the top of my list of resolutions. It’s tasty and makes my friends tolerable, but apparently some sickly soul must have coughed on one of the half-dozen glasses that found their way to my hand, and passed along a bit of a fast acting stomach flu to me. I’m much better now, thank you.

To kick off the first day of 2017, my wife asked if I would like to accompany her to the movie theater to see Will Smith’s new film “Collateral Beauty”. I am not one to go to a movie willy-nilly, just for the sake of going to a movie, as I see it as an investment of my time and I value time, mine and yours. I found the movie description intriguing “Retreating from life after tragedy, a man questions the universe by writing to Love, Time and Death” so I decided to give it a go.

As a minor side note, I prefer to call movie theaters “show halls”, but have found that nobody outside of northwest North Dakota seems to know what I’m talking about, and I grew weary of the pointing and laughing. My Grandpa Fritz took us to the Columbus Show Hall, not some hoity-toity theater, to see “Smokey and the Bandit”.

Although my taste in movies may be questionable, you may find comfort in knowing that both my wife and I thought it was a good flick. It was well acted, thought provoking, and it managed to pull a tear or two down my cheek. I’ve attempted, with moderate success, to train my tear ducts to only release tears from the side away from wife during movies to limit the mocking.

As the description may have indicated, the movie spoke of time, and that coupled with the arrival of the New Year, has time on my mind as I sit down to write this first column of the new year. New Year’s is an interesting time. It’s as if, for a fleeting moment, we get to straddle time…past, present, future…all right there, all at once. We stand in the present swaying to “Auld Lang Syne” with our arms draped around the shoulders of friends and loved ones, thinking back fondly, looking forward hopefully.

The parties over folks, it’s time to take on another year. As the late Steve Jobs once said, “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”

Here’s to time, may good people and good times make you lose track of it often.