What a beautiful day it’s been … Highs were in the 50s and 60s, the skies were mostly clear, as you can see from this DCist photo of the equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson in Lafayette Square taken near sunset. The first day of the New Year’s three-day weekend seems to have played climatological tricks on us. Perhaps Mother Nature has some big mass of Canadian cold air in store for us, but we hear that even Chicago is in the 50s. Check out Capital Weather for the latest.

Everyone seems to be in a good mood … even the sometimes chilly LaRouchites, who were staffing an informational table on 18th Street in Adams Morgan. Though they were out in front of the Diner talking about what LaRouchites talk about, they were mellow, refraining from using sidewalk ambush tactics that have pissed off plenty of D.C. pedestrians during the past election cycle.

In the meantime, we hope you enjoy your New Years celebrations.

It’s been quite a year. And DCist has only been in existence to cover a little less than half of it. So we can’t exactly do full justice in an end-of-the-year looking back post. We’ve already done the top 10 DCist posts of the year, now we’re going to do a full retrospective of what’s shaped our city.