Year in Review - 2009

These are the first sentences of the first post I did for each month in 2009. I first did this in 2007, when my overall theme was work and remodeling. In 2008 it was more work, plus politics. In 2009, the theme, if any, was more reflective (gee, I wonder if turning 60 in September had anything to do with that?), plus, of course, humor. Here's to a funnier 2010! Happy New Year!

January 1 - It's a little after midnight and I'm about to curl up on the couch in the gameroom to watch Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire movies into the wee hours of the morning.
February 1 - It's Super Bowl Sunday and there was a time I'd have been blogging about that.
March 1 - So my boss came by my cube a couple of weeks ago, as is her wont, sat down and said, "I saw a truck with, uh, balls hanging off the back of it this afternoon. Do you know anything about that?"
April 1 - I love to laugh, and so I especially love April Fool's Day, and all the creative and wonderful pranks that people come up with.
May 1 - Friday night cocktails at A's.
June 14 - Tonight I went to the Meyerson and heard Joe Cocker.
July 2 - A couple of weeks ago, over at Women On, Lisa invited writers to post on Cringe TV, the kind of stuff that makes you cringe when you watch it, referencing an NPR article that cited the stories then circulating about Jon and Kate Plus Eight.
August 1 - It's August 1. Where did July go?
September 1 - (September Song) - I love this song, and although Sinatra made it famous (and I love Sinatra), I really like this version by Johnny Fair.
October 1 - This is Samantha Geiner at 13.
November 3 - Ah, the joys of aging.
December 1 - I love December.

Merry Christmas 2009

This has been one incredible Christmas.

I've happily had a house full of family: all of my children, their spouses and my two grandsons were here on Christmas Eve, not to mention Ike, the orange tabby who found his way into my life a little over a year ago, on the weekend of the hurricane for which he's named. A couple of weeks ago he went out one night for what I thought would be a few minutes except that he didn't come back, and stayed gone for 13 days, only to reappear two days ago. And yes, he is now an indoor cat forevermore. And last but not least, SNOW...yes, SNOW, in Dallas, for Christmas...so this year, in Dallas, we had a white Christmas. Wow.

Merry Christmas!

I'm in love...

with my new MAC!

On which I'm writing this entry...in my living room...in front of the Christmas tree... after watching movie trailers on a wonderful app called iMovie. I should have done this a long time ago...I'll never go back to a PC, and for what it's worth, I'm loving the laptop.

overheard at Christmas tree lot...

I was at Home Depot looking for a Christmas tree this past weekend when two women around my age selected what appeared to be a beauty; however, when the tree guy stood it up and shook it out, there was a big hole in the back.

"Oh, there's a hole there!" one woman exclaimed, sounding dismayed.

The tree guy, an older man who looked as though he'd heard everything, wasn't fazed.

"Yes, that's how God made this beautiful tree, with a hole in the back", he said quietly.

Well, what do you say to that?

The women bought the tree.

I'm goin' MAC...

Yep, this afternoon I did it. I went to Micro Center, who had an incredibly sweet deal on the new MacBook, and bought one. Sleek white plastic unibody, OS X Snow Leopard plus iLife...even the box it comes in is chic and oh so spare...

Earlier this week I went to Hunch where I took the quiz, Am I A PC Person or a Mac Person? I came out 91% Mac, which didn't surprise me.

Ch-ch-ch-changes...

What's next? A live tree this year, for sure.

Pink Glove Dance

This is a wonderful video. Medline Industries, Inc., began manufacturing pink gloves as a way to promote breast cancer awareness, and they agreed to donate some of the profits from the sale of the pink gloves to fund mammograms for women who can’t afford them. To promote the gloves and breast cancer awareness, more than 200 staff members of Providence St. Vincent Medical Center in Portland, Oregon, made this video wearing the pink gloves and dancing to Jay Sean’s song “Down”. Enjoy (and get a mammogram!).

Whoa...December 1st ALREADY?

photo downloaded from Google Images

I love December. There's always been a wonderful sort of magic to the month for me, not least of which is the happy anticipation of Christmas and New Year's Eve. A couple of light years ago, I got married in December, and one of the wedding gifts we received was a beautiful set of handmade cocktail napkins embroidered with Oliver Herford's verse:

"I heard a bird sing,
in the dark of December
A magical thing
And sweet to remember
'We are nearer to spring
Than we were in September'
I heard a bird sing
In the dark of December..."

I still have the napkins. Too beautiful to use (and too fragile...they're embroidered on voile), I planned to have them framed, a task that 36 years after I received them remains undone, and one that perhaps I need to add to my list of 2010 New Year's resolutions, where it will appear somewhere after the recently added but now top of the list item: to replace the guest bath hot water heater, which seems to have sprung a small but ominous leak. Water heater leaks are always ominous, I've learned.

In the meantime...happily, my house is beginning to look a lot like Christmas.