The Corsican New Year

We celebrated the New Year 6 hours ahead of most of you and 9 hours ahead of some of you and 12 hours after a few of you, etc.
We had a great dinner with our new friends in Ajaccio on New Year's Eve (at midnight, everyone in the city fired their guns into the air...for a few hours, it felt like baghdad), and the next day dove for urchins and cracked them open, dumped out the gunk and ate (so we learned later) their genitals. Clearly, 2008 is starting off on the right foot.
Despite everyone's thought that we're living on a beach here and that the weather is always sunny, we are actually in the high mountains and had some snow (enough that I bought chains for our little Twingo tires--the chains are about the size of bracelets, to give you an idea how little our car is), and we are expecting more snow this week. So Jackson saw his first real French flakes. He's also made his first French friend (named Matthieu). In other developments, I chopped my first bit of wood, and Sarah conducted her first and second interview.
We also celebrated the day "Dwight was born," which is how we do Christmas in our family.
And Jackson has started dressing in camoflauge, to fit in, you know.
We've been on some crazy hikes.Jackson rides in our pack and babbles into our ears. If there were bear on this island, he'd scare them off.
We also went to Bastia, where Jackson reconfirmed that he's a city boy by running (literally) along the water and through the streets screeching in glee.
He has a new Corsican dance (very serious) that he does when any music comes on, and he has started drawing with a stick in the dirt using a technique he created that is similar to some kind of jijitsu (he yells, "hiya" every time he releases from a stroke). Hope that suffices for captions. Here are the pictures you've been waiting for: