One and Done #11

People speak of decades as if they form natural endings, when in fact they seldom end anything cleanly. Human survivors are dragged into new slices of time with which they feel no harmony and in which they are often exposed to rasping change.

-Margaret Cheney, Tesla: Man Out Of Time

This would be a way more appropriate quote if we were, in fact, turning decades this year, but let’s face it: I’m not going to remember this quote by then.

Looks like Casey had a rough night.

Here are your links:

I loved this post at fiftyfourandahalf Our New Year’s Eve Tradition. Last night I was in bed before midnight, just wiped out and grateful to not have to be in the city. Even #5 stayed up to watch the ball drop, but I just couldn’t take poor Dick Clark again. Maybe next year I’ll strive for consciousness and give this tradition a shot.

Yesterday I made a homemade chicken pot pie à la The Pioneer Woman. If you’re not a real cook (like me) but sometimes have to feed your large-ish family (like me), then you should totally get Ree’s cookbook The Pioneer Woman Cooks. If you’re as lucky as me (not likely), your husband will buy the cookbook for you and also make most of the recipes out of it. Here’s the pot pie recipe on her website: Leftover Turkey Pot Pie. PS: I used a pre-made pie crust. Sue me.

Karen at kloppenmum had a good post on Wisdom vs. Knowledge.

Short fiction about Berlin by A.S.J. Ellis: The Berlin Diaries (Part II)

The bad-ass-est marshmallow snowman ever. I Shall Win the Snowman Contest For Myself at Spectrum Woman.

Happy 2012.

Resolution Revolution

So I made some New Year’s resolutions for 2011. I do that some years. Not every year, but some, with varying degrees of success.

This year I even learned something about it:

The key to being successful with resolutions lies in how you measure and define success.

I believe that wanting to improve is already an improvement- though not enough of an improvement.

Gretchen Rubin’s excellent book The Happiness Project is based on New Year’s resolutions. Umm . . . neurotic and obsessive New Year’s resolutions. I enjoyed the book even though her approach is totally not my style. Early on she says something about how there’s a difference between being depressed and just not being very happy. I read the rest of her book, but also, because of that, I got help. So I owe a little something to Gretchen Rubin.

I read her book at the end of 2009, and for 2010 I came up with six categories that I wanted to improve in. That’s it. No giant lists, no things to check off, just six parts of my life that I wanted to be better. When I got to the end of 2010, five of them were improved.

For the hell of it, in 2011 I did a longer list, in a few different styles. I’m not one who believes that lists must be done a specific way in order for them to work. In fact, I mostly rebel against lists of all types. But I did this list of resolutions for 2011.

Some I did affirmation style: I put out a blog post every Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday.

Others were check-off items: Take a Zumba class. Sell something on eBay.

I reserved the right to get to them when I got to them. This is the first blog I’ve ever done, but I didn’t start it until February 22. I didn’t look at my list of resolutions after the first week of 2011 and lament that I would never be a blogger. I got to it when I could get to it.

I reserved the right to decide I didn’t really want to do them after all. I did two solid months of writing down the dictionary.com Word of the Day before I felt like I could let it go, because I found I just didn’t care that much.

I reserved the right to count any forward momentum a success. One of my resolutions was to finish The Norton Anthology of Literature By Women this year. It’s a book that I’ve been carting around with me since Christmas of 1995 but never opened, and it’s 2390 onion-skin thin pages in eight-point type. I figured out that if I read ten pages a day I would make it. That gave me plenty of room to blow it off- two days a week, in fact.

What happened, surprisingly, is that I was riveted. I couldn’t put the damn thing down (which is saying a lot, because it’s not easy to hold). I was inspired to read more by certain authors than just the excerpts included in the anthology. I downloaded and polished off Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Linda Brent and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, sat through two different film versions of Jane Eyre, and was still way the hell ahead.

Until July, at which point I got bogged down in Rebecca West. Her Indissoluble Matrimony, to be exact.

I don’t know why it took me so long to get though that piece. It probably merits more consideration. Perhaps I’ll put that on my list this year. Or not.

Anyway. I eventually plowed through Ms. West and kept on, but I never regained my momentum and now with about 48 hours left in 2011, I’m on page 1615. Seven hundred and seventy-five pages short of my goal.

I consider this a resounding success. That’s 1615 pages more than I would have read in this book this year had I not made the resolution. I refuse to beat myself up for falling short and have no plans to get all jacked up on quadruple espressos to stay up from now until next year to try to finish on time. Though I do intend to finish.

In the past when I’ve done lists of resolutions, I’ve gotten frustrated by what I perceive as lack of progress and just bagged the whole thing and stopped even trying. That old perfect-or-screw-it mentality.

I dunno. Something about getting older is helping me mellow a little bit there. Something about acting as a parent is making me more realistic and optimistic, and more able to recognize small successes (as well as the fact that the world does not revolve around me, and who gives a rat’s ass anyway if I have an extra cookie?).

One of my favorite ways to start on my New Year’s resolutions is to begin them in the old year. A goal for 2009 was to begin a regular meditation practice, so my friend Polly and I went to a Learn to Meditate class in the last week of 2008.

This year- just Wednesday, in fact- I’ve started tracking all my money on a ledger sheet. Pen and paper. I haven’t yet decided if the 2012 resolution will be some new agey affirmation like, “I track all my income and outflow on paper and it brings abundance to me,” or if it will be, simply, “Money.”

But I’ll figure it out. And whatever it ends up being, I’m already ahead.

Meanwhile, the only resolution I have for 2012 so far is this:

“Do, or do not. There is no try.” – Yoda

Enjoy the end of your 2011.

One and Done #10

Hey. It’s One and Done Sunday.

Also, it’s Christmas.

One and Done Sunday is supposed to be nice and easy. One picture, and five links that are worth your time.

However, since I’ve been offline for like three weeks, I’ve only read two things and they’re not blogs. They’re articles that CC sent me links to, one with the email subject of “ewwwww” and the other with a subject of “EWWWWWWWWW!”.

The first is an article in Wired about how you can catch the Bubonic Plague from letting your dog sleep in your bed.

The second is an article on Yahoo connecting deaths from brain-eating amoeba to neti pot use with tap water.

The first year the kids lived with us I went on antibiotics five times for sinus & respiratory infections, including a bout with bronchitis that had me largely bedridden for a month with a fever that reached 104 degrees more than once. Then I found a great ENT and a neti pot. They changed my life.

My awesome ENT suggested that I use the pre-made saline solution and heat it in the microwave, rather than making it up with tap water and the salt packets. He said it would be more effective. That just seemed like extra steps to me, so I did not heed his advice and used hot tap water from the bathroom with the salt packets. After all, he said the pre-made solution was “more effective”. AT NO TIME did he mention the phrase, “brain-eating amoeba” in association with tap water. This seems to me a severe oversight on his part, and I may be reconsidering his awesomeness.

A word to doctors: if you want to get your patients’ attention, just use that phrase, “brain-eating amoeba”.

I’m sure the phrase, “flesh-eating bacteria” will have a similar effect.

As for the other links. . . uhhh. . . let’s see here. Well, Erin from Momfog is consistently kicking my ass on Words With Friends and she scored this one word on me that was worth 141 points. I was simultaneously impressed and humiliated. That has nothing to do with anything she posted but I like her blog. Oh, also, if you got a Kindle for Christmas, you should download Elena Aitken’s book Unexpected Gifts because it’s fun and sexy and every Kindle needs some o’ that.

If you wrote or read a post you want to share, put a link in the comments section below. Because I don’t really think that the Black Death and brain-eating amoeba are very festive links to put up at holiday time and my mom might get mad at me about that.

Here’s a slideshow of some pictures I took in the city this week.

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