Tonight is Rosh HaShannah, the Jewish New Year. The traditional greeting is Shana Tova (have a good year). This is a festival of celebration, of giving thanks for the year that was and anticipating the year that will be. It also involves plenty of food, and especially this year with the Grand Final tomorrow. I've got A$50 on Brisbane.

The idea is to spend the week and a half from tonight until Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) to reflect and to make resolutions for the year ahead. The original idea was these resolutions should be things like "I'm going to spend more time reading religious books" and "I'm going to do good deeds." At the end of the 10 days God makes his decision of who will be inscribed in the Book of Life and Death. The title says it all, hence these 10 days are called the 10 days of repentence. Truth is though there is not a lot of rhyme or reason as to who goes into the book. That doesn't mean one shouldn't try and do good things. Just that the decision is out of your hands.

I do enjoy the various services at this time of year but this is my first year that I won't be in Sydney for the holidays. We'll see how Hong Kong goes about it - we're off to the synagogue in the Mid-Levels tonight (a beautiful 19th Century Serphardi style building surrounded by high rises).

Personally I like to use this time as a measuring stick, adding the good and subtracting the bad and seeing what the difference is. It's been a big year, again. We've watched PB go from baby to infant and watched JC go from infant to toddler. That said last night about midnight JC started calling out and making a ruckus over nothing much and proceeded to do so for the next hour, so if she's lucky she might just make it out of toddler status before Mrs M and I gag her. We moved out of our house and life in Sydney and came to Hong Kong. We packed the house, sent half to storage and half to HK. We moved the girls, endured SARS, found an apartment, moved in, unpacked the boxes, found a helper, had Misti the wonder dog shipped over, found a school for JC, met plenty of people and started our new life. You could say its been busy. And that's not mentioning the travelling for work and pleasure, the return to Oz for a month and celebrating my 30th.

What about the year ahead? Usually I find you start out thinking about all the things I will do in the year ahead, how I will be a better person and blah blah. The truth is it's a never-ending task, not a once a year thing. The one lesson I have finally learnt though is this: each year is more unpredictable than the last, and each brings its share of surprises, good and bad. Luckily the good tends to be better and more frequent than the bad. At the end of the day that's all I can ask for.