Ten years ago...

... I was celebrating my first New Year -- and a new millenium -- with my new husband. If I'm remembering correctly, we spent it hanging out with friends of his who were very boring and very drunk (neither of us drink). It was anticlimactic.

Over the years, we've spent some New Year's Eves in New York with family, some in our varying locales which were referred to as "home" at the time, and have pretty much never really set any traditions for how we ring in each New Year. Usually we watch a movie and try to pause it in time to watch the ball in Time Square drop but we don't always catch it. We do drink sparkling cider out of a couple of very garish glasses (read: not pretty).

Last year we did nothing. You picture two boring people sitting in front of the television, don't you? You would be wrong.

I spent the entirety of the evening reading Breaking Dawn. It took me four or five hours, but I began and finished it in one night and went to bed sometime before four. At some point before midnight, Bryan came out of his office, sprawled out on the sofa with his head in my lap and went to sleep. It sounds cute and romantic, but I mostly thought it was hard to read my book with his head in the way.

That was last year. I didn't mind it so much but I'm not currently reading any engrossing series, so our New Year will most likely revert to previous years: movies streamed from Netflix over XBox Live, sparkling cider in not-pretty glasses, trying to catch Dick Clark (or his replacement figure) before the strike of midnight.

I'm crossing my fingers that next year I'll be wearing heels and make-up and ringing in the New Year a little more noisily. I think we're due for some noise.

What are your plans?

Everyone's Doing It...

And by "it," I mean something boring like introspection.

2009: The year in which I learned exactly what I'm capable of and precisely how I'm not measuring up to my potential.

Thank you, 2009, for that shot to my ego.




Okay, fine. If I were going to jump off the bridge that everyone else is, I would actually be recapping just how much my year sucked, but let's be honest: my year did not suck. So, broken down into the same number as there are months of the year but having nothing to do with actual months (as well as being in no particular order), here are the highlights of 2009:

1. Writing 2000 pages between March 3rd and November 25th.
2. Burn Burn and "Monkey Brains"
3. Seeing Our Lady Peace live in Boston
4. Marking our 10th wedding anniversary.
5. Becoming privy to Bethany's secret blog, then watching her make it very un-secret.
6. Writing 30 pages in one day. That was awesome. I am awesome.
7. Discovering - a world - of hilarious - blogs - in the - world.
8. Twitter. Yes, I am considering Twitter one of the highlights of my year.
9. Discovering Neverending Whitelights, Silversun Pickups, The Black Keys and City and Colour. I don't know how I've been living my life up until now without City and Colour.
10. Having Daniel Victor of Neverending White Lights respond to a tweet of mine. This world is very small.
11. Donating to various charities as part of our Christmas preparations/ celebrations. This made me very, very happy.
12. I'm having trouble coming up with a twelfth, but I suspect that has to do with the fact that there are certain things even I keep private. However, in private, I use words like "epic" to refer to said highlights.

p.s. Dear Boob Nazi, I would have linked to your blog, which I follow loyally, but as you're private once more, I couldn't very well link to you. Sincerely, Punk