Becky feeds a peacock while crouching in front of a beautiful orange flowering tree at Smith’s Tropical Paradise on Dec. 27.

A humpback whale flips its tail up into the air! Here’s another whale tail, and here’s a whole bunch of whales — I count four. We also saw dolphins during our Dec. 26 boat ride, including this spinner dolphin swimming right alongside the boat.

Becky stands on deck and looks dramatically out into the ocean during our Dec. 26 boat ride.

A view of the beautiful Na Pali coast during our Dec. 26 boat ride. Here’s a scenic coastline view, and a shot of the sunrise from the boat.

I stand in front of a scenic vista in northern Kauai on Dec. 25.

Before heading to the beach on Christmas Day, we checked out these cool “wet caves” along Kauai’s north shore.

A classic tropical scene in Kauai on Dec. 25, Christmas Day.

I just wanted to make note of today’s date. :)

It’s been an unusual — and very fun — holiday for me. A bit of New Year’s, a bit of Christmas, a bit of football, and a lot of Lord of the Rings…

Fireworks in Hartford: Happy 6:00 PM! Here’s another picture of fireworks, and here’s a picture of people watching fireworks.

Last night, we went to the First Night “kiddie” fireworks show in downtown Hartford at 6:00 PM. I guess we were celebrating the European new year. :) Then we headed home, watched The Fellowship of the Ring extended-edition DVD (in preparation to watch The Two Towers today), and… decorated our Christmas tree.

That’s right. Because I was in Hawaii on Dec. 25, we delayed our family Christmas to Jan. 1. My parents bought a tree on Christmas Eve, but decided to leave it unadorned until I came home. So we decorated it on New Year’s Eve, and I set the lights to come on at midnight.

Our beautiful Christmas tree, which was lit up for the first time at midnight, Jan. 1, 2003.

Aside from watching the tree lights turn themselves on, we watched Dick Clark count down to 2003 in Times Square on ABC. As you can see below, we were surrounded on the living room couch by a small army of stuffed animals celebrating the start of both the New Year and “Adollyan Family Christmas.”

Happy New Year! And, uh, Merry Christmas!

Then we put our presents under the tree and went to bed. When I awoke — shortly after 10:00 AM, when both my parents were already up — I found a “Santa display” of unwrapped presents on the couch, and a stuffed stocking on the mantle.

Kitty, who traditionally spends Christmas Eve every year in the stocking where she was “born,” is joined by a new frog (who seems to be hitting on her) and a bear on Christmas morning. Here’s a photo of the gifts on the couch.

And yes, Santa was good to me. My best present: a 10-gigabyte MP3 player-slash-external hard drive. Not bad… and quite useful for dealing with the thorny problems created by my dying laptop hard drive.

Anyway, a few hours later we headed to the theater in Berlin to watch The Two Towers. We were a fellowship of five: me, my parents, and my friends Sean and Jen. For Sean and me, it was viewing #2; the others were seeing it for the first time. Having seen it again and more fully digested it, I can now amend my previous review and say that, yes, I think it’s incredibly good — better than the Fellowship.

Although I don’t like several of the plot changes, I can live with almost all of them. The one big exception is the Osgiliath scene, which, like the breaking of the fellowship in the first movie (when Aragorn “lets Frodo go”), I’ll just have to cringe every time I watch it. Oh, well. On the bright side, although exceptionally good overall, the movie leaves enough room for improvement to allow for hope that the Return of the King will be the best movie of them all.

So anyway, that’s been my day. And now I’m home watching football games. I’m thrilled that Notre Dame lost badly, but the Rose Bowl is not going well. Unless Washington State mounts a huge fourth-quarter comeback, the Pac-10 will fall to 1-5 — that’s one and five — in bowl games! Eeek! But hopefully USC will set things right in the Orange Bowl tomorrow. Surely the Trojans must feel inspired to play their best after being visited at practice by a double-murderer.

UPDATE, 01/04/03, 1:28 AM: The Two Towers made $11,574,000 on New Year’s Day, increasing its box-office total to $230,837,000 through 14 days. It’s within $15 million of surpassing Harry Potter 2 (which only made $2.1 million on New Year’s Day).