Happy 2009! May You Too Get Dragged in a Sack

Happy New Year! I’m going up to the attic to pound the treadmill, make up the crib for our baby and the bed for our pre-schooler, both coming here to sleep and eat and tear the place apart next weekend while their parents do the same in New Orleans.Right now Old Dave is putting away Christmas and there’s the upside in having a control freak for a husband:I don't have to so much as place one ornament into a box because I could do it wrong and then what? - so little elderly Charlotte the cat and I are sitting on our plump pin-cushion bottoms, she licking her paws and I writing to you.Sad to say, my boy Mike was no happier about the picture of him on our Christmas card when he finally saw it than he thought he might be. (See last post.) He read it silently a few times, then put it down on my desk and said only one word - “Shame” - which for an old recovery girl like me lit up about six danger signals in my brain and caused me shortness of breath for over an hour..... Luckily, it turned out he wasn’t THAT mad - said later “I shamed you and now I’m past it” – after which we all played Celebrity, a ridiculously fun game involving fast-paced charades, which I rock at since I have no dignity.New Years Eve is the birthday of our oldest girl Carrie so the night before last we celebrated by going to the wee house-in-the-woods she keeps with her own true love Chris and the above-mentioned little ones. We were all there, and also our girl Annie’s tall, much-muscled firefighter/paramedic boyfriend who manhandled the pre-schooler and dragged him around the floor inside a silken sack, much to the child’s delight. The rest of us sucked down a special rice the girls made using an actual Japanese fan, along with pot stickers, baby scallops and FINE wines and vodkas and sat by the fire.I've been keeping a diary for 50 years and last year I wrote in it only about 40% of the time. This of course is because I had you talk to. Though this ephemeral medium might not last as long as paper and ink, still it was worth it:You kept me company in my lonely writer’s job for which I say thanks; thanks for clicking through every time and may this day and all your future days be as lively and full for you as they have been for us!