The Year of Slack

I’ve been AWOL here and with all the usual eggnoggy reasons. We’ve been Christmasing big time. Have you ever heard that Karen Carpenter song where she says she’ll be “Christmasing with youuuuuuu” in that buttery kind of voice? For the record, it was my husband that brought Karen Carpenter with him to the marriage. Karen, ABBA and three copies of Vanilla Ice’s debut and only album. I brought Amy Grant and the Indigo Girls, so I think I might be morally superior.

Anyway, we have been, like you all, happily exhausted and are just now starting to look like normal, paler versions of ourselves. I’d like to mention here that it is UNFATHOMABLY COLD where I live. I’m talking single digits when we’re really tropical and negative temps when we’re not. Mostly, this kind of weather makes me want to do three things:

1. Eat high calorie foods and finish every meal with a chocolate lava cake.
2. Lock my children in their rooms so I can read a novel by the fire.
3. Curl up to the humidifier and tape my lips around the wet air. You knoweth not dry air until you knoweth Iowa in the winter.

Unfortunately, no one around here seems to want to accommodate any of these requests. I could eat the cake every day but I’d also have to make the cake every day. Also, by about the eleventh day, I’d start looking a lot like the cake, lumpy and liquid in the middle and such.

I suppose I could lock the kids in their rooms but what about the Department of Child Welfare? We do have one of those in Iowa and although I could get a couple of hours lead time just because of the snowy road conditions, I still think it’s too big a risk.

As for the humidifier, the tape on my lips starts to hurt after about four minutes, though I got a great (and cheap!) upper lip wax.

In the absence of getting what I want, however, I will not be coerced into doing what I do NOT want to do which is make a list of New Year’s resolutions and show them to Marc. All my life, from the time I could write my name, my dad made me write a list of goals for the New Year.

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Or at least that’s how I remember it.

Then I went and married Part Deux! Marc’s no better. He just uses his laptop and makes spreadsheets. I followed along for the first ten years (learned helplessness) but have decided that this year, no, I won’t! I will live a live without goal sheets! No goals! Intentions, perhaps, but that’s it! And if after a month or so, I’m dying in wilderness of goal-lessness, I’ll write one or two down in ancient Babylonian script so no one asks me next year what they say and if I did what I set out to.

Ha!

Ha ha!

Did you see that Big Wheel in the background? I think I’m due for a spin. Ha!