New Year

I'm glad it's a new year. My daughter is officially a teenager now, and that's a little scary, but whatever. 2007 was a far more eventful year than I really cared for, and now I'd just like to have a regular old boring 2008. As I told Reasonable Man earlier this evening, in 2008, we get to live in our nice new house without the aggravation of buying it and moving into it, and that is a fine thing indeed. I would also like to have no one in my family require surgery, emergency or otherwise, this year. Elective cosmetic procedures don't count -- not that I have any planned, but I wouldn't rule it out either.

I now have a MySpace page, for no good reason other than that over Christmas, RM and I were drinking copious amounts of wine with his younger brothers, and they all have MySpace page, and so does RM because he needed one in order to join, or "friend" or whatever it is, the page someone in his high school class started in order to organize/gather info for their upcoming 20-year high school reunion. And so now I have this MySpace page with six friends: RM, his three brothers, the aforementioned high school reunion page (and I didn't even go to that high school), and a page that apparently represents the comedy club they sometimes have at a restaurant here in Davis, which sent me a friend request. My brothers-in-law explained to me that now I need to gather lots and lots of of these "friends." I'm not that into this, though, considering that I don't even know why I have the damn MySpace page in the first place. Nevertheless, if you happen to be reading this, and you have a MySpace page to and you want to see mine or friend me or something, the URL is http://www.myspace.com/tkbezerra and, you know, whatever. Anyone who reads something I wrote and says something halfway nice to me is my friend forever, so they can certainly be my "friend" too.

When I started this blog, I swore I would never use the word "blog" as a verb, and now I do it all the time, so I'm not even going to pretend I won't someday use the word "friend" as a verb on a regular basis if I get into this whole MySpace thing.

In other news, I limp toward the 50K mark and, more importantly, completion, on my November novel. I haven't worked on it as much as I would have liked, but I've still made some good progress on it, especially in the past week. Obviously the concept of 50,000 words is arbitrary at this point, since I didn't "win" NaNoWriMo this year, but I do think that the novel needs to be at least that long and probably somewhat longer in order to be viable, marketable, etc. I would very much like to have a draft for my "inner circle" of readers to read pretty soon, and am toying with the idea of a January 30 deadline for that.

This year I think I enjoyed the preparations for Christmas better than the experience of Christmas itself. I got some very nice gifts and always appreciate what people are kind enough to give me, but I guess I really am an adult now because receiving presents just isn't that big a part of the holiday for me anymore. Here were the things I enjoyed most this season:
1) Getting out the decorations and watching all my stress about them eventually result in the house looking great for our first Christmas here
2) Spending time with our friends here (and other places) before and after Christmas and on New Year's Eve
3) Going to Weight Watchers and feeling proud of the fact that I was staying accountable and not gaining a bunch of weight over the holidays
4) Having my family come for our annual early Christmas dinner on the 22nd and especially sitting around the table after dinner, talking and laughing and enjoying each other
5) Hanging out with my brothers-in-law, creating the MySpace page I have no use for and laughing a lot

I just realized none of those things involve my kids. That is definitely something to work on next year!

Tomorrow, RM heads back to work after being off the last week and a half, and for him it's almost a new job, since he has handed off the work that has taken up most of his time for the last two years and can start doing the stuff he much prefers. So that is yet another way this year will be better. And I head back to the gym for only the second time in the last week, for a personal training session. And that's a good thing. I can definitely see the results of my working out regularly this past year. I am also 10 lbs thinner than I was a year ago. I'd like that to be more, but 10 lbs is not bad, and I will keep plugging away at it.

Finally, I've been watching a lot of this show "Clean House" on the Style Network. I guess it's pretty much the same as "Clean Sweep" on TLC, where people who are drowning in clutter have the show come in and help them get rid of stuff in a yard sale and then use the money they make to organize and decorate. I never got that into "Clean Sweep," though. Anyway, it gets me thinking, and in the past several days, I have done a lot of decluttering and organizing of our bedroom closet, which is big enough that when we moved in, we just kind of put all our crap in there in a stupid way and it didn't matter because there was room for it. I've freecycled off lots of stuff that is now making someone else happy, and RM and I got in there and moved some stuff around so it all functions more efficiently. It's a good thing. It's never going to look like one of those professionally tricked out closets, but it doesn't need to. We're happy with it. And all of this has me really thinking about simplification, recycling, reusing and all of that other earth-friendly stuff as I go into the new year.

So that's how things are in the not-green house on this first day of the new year. Here's hoping we all have a great 2008!