Day One: 2008

Some folk believe that whatever you do on New Year's Day is how you will spend the rest of the year. This tears us between goofing the day away in recreational activities we love; the "improvement" promises we made the night before, probably while drunk, and the mundane chores of every day life that you know you don't do enough, so perhaps this superstition will take some of the pressure off your own discipline.

Perhaps I will spend 2008 writing awkwardly constructed sentences.

So I missed a week there in 2007. Here is your re-cap:

While you were away from the Mill: Big Sweaty resigned.
Boo frickin' hoo, as we say around my cube. Goodbye smokebreak meeting. Goodbye morning harangue. Goodbye Howard Dean-style rally cheers when the mikes are on. Glad to have won one of the last iPods.

This kind of power vaccum usually has disasterous results. I tried to press Rock Star in our last 1:1 for the secret plans for the future, but she encouraged me to leverage my synergistic opportunities for low-hanging fruit while simonizing my verisimilitude. Or...something.

I think I will put my iPod in my ears and go back to my loom. I managed to create an 8 hr playlist of gospel music. Swing low, chariot.

Down Souff: Overnight at Dodie and Ric's, made complete by a BBQ assortment platter, FF, and slaw. Yum. Yum. The highlight of our evening was a challenge Dodie had issued that she had listed 50 phrases or terms invented by us and our cronies and I had to come up with the same 50. We overlapped by fewer than 10, cursed ourselves for forgetting the obvious, and laughed our heads off. It is so inside baseball it is not worth posting, but trust me - it was hilarious, and our mutual childhood was very very strange. I made her watch the Hot Dog movie and she had to lie down from the nosebleed.

Driving Invalid: My mother has made her complete recovery from hip replacement, down to driving and returning to work this week. The formally housebound was out on the town: 1 theatre performance, 3 church services, and a quest to find plain seltzer (4 stops, but we got it at Food Lion). Better believe I bought a gallon of it. On a whim of out-with-the-old, we blew through her closet and filled several bags and boxes for the church yard sale. My general advice, "If you are still wearing purple and teal together, just stop."

Spinster Aunt: The one thing I have going for me is a working knowledge of audio-visual toys, which puts me ahead of most of my sister's household. Then I undermine that by saying ridiculous things like "Why do this, when you could be playing a real guitar?" and "You know that the word 'you' actually has 3 letters, don't you?" I play the Boston Priss to the hilt around my niece, who (one must confess) is more girly than I was at her age, but I enjoy the look on her face when I tell her I got her a strand of pearls for Christmas and she should write her thank you notes right now while we are waiting for iTunes to download. If she could have texted them, she might have done it.

Her mother and I accompanied her and a giant pair of pants with a boy in them to the movies and lunch at Applebee's. Then I checked myself into a retirement home. And I can't get "Slow Ride" out of my head.

1 Day back: I like taking 6 days off work, coming back for 1, then taking another off. Perhaps I can get this approved as a regular schedule. Scored a great deal on after-holiday turkey breast, only to find out it was a mislabeled turkey thigh, and well, that is just gross. But I cooked it anyway and now need to find some way to disguise the last of it.

Welcome back to DrawingIn 2008. Remember that comments build community, and make my blog look popular. It's a tough market out there.