I Resolve

I'm not much for New Year's Resolutions. Are you?
I think the New Year is a good time to take stock, but I hate how people criticize themselves so much.
Of course, I want to eat  healthier, exercise more, be a better wife and mother, write more...
But instead of making and breaking resolutions, I've made two simple promises for this year.
The first is to not use plastic bags from stores. All I have to do is take my own cloth bags with me everywhere I go. If I don't have a cloth bag, I'll have to take my merchandise without a bag. I think I can do this one fairly well, as long as the insistent bag boys don't force me to take plastic bags for my meat.
My other goal is to spend about an hour outdoors most days, even in the winter. That shouldn't be too difficult if I get out and run in the mornings. I'm usually outside for an hour running. I like the idea of spending one of every 24 hours in nature, even if it's in the city and running along a street.
How bout you? Will you change anything in the coming year? What are the odds you'll stick to it?

2013, I'm Ready For You

What can I say?
An inauspicious beginning to 2013, but I'm sure things will begin to look up from here.
My Uncle Clarence died on Jan. 1, 2013. He's my mother's second oldest brother. In his 80s, he was slim, his hair still dark, and he had a high, southern, tenor voice. Yesterday, he watched the ball drop at midnight, went to bed about 12:30 then his wife couldn't wake him up the next morning. He hadn't been sick.
Uncle Clarence told me stories about fighting in World War II when I asked him. He showed me a huge certificate he got in the Navy when they crossed the International Date Line. His younger brother, who fought in the Korean War, got a tiny billfold sized certificate. It's funny that they both carried those with them. The big certificate was in an envelope in the car.
But some less dire things happened on the first day of the new year too.
For New Year's, we let Tucker, 16, have a gathering. He refused to call it a party. But there were a lot of kids here. Earl and I camped out at the neighbors, coming over every hour or so to check on the party.

Sometimes a cat is the only comfort.

Tucker promised to control things and he had a miserable time, which is to be expected. He explained that at one point, giving up, he took the cat and lay on his bed. He couldn't wait for everyone to go home.
At 12:15, he shot over to the neighbor's house to get the car keys and drive home a friend.
"Don't you want to wait til everyone leaves?" I asked him.
"Nope," he said.
Grace and her friends had returned and were shuffling teenagers out of the house.
"Does everyone have rides home? Anyone need a ride?" Earl and I asked. We aren't stupid about teenagers and alcohol.
After everyone left, Grace said the toilet in the downstairs bathroom was broken. I figured it was either clogged or the handle had come unhooked from the mechanism in the toilet tank.
Nope.
The toilet tank was empty of any water and had a big hole in the bottom of it. How does someone put a hole in a porcelain toilet tank?
Luckily, whoever did it, knew to turn off the water to the toilet so it didn't flood the whole house. Also, the towels in the bathroom were lying in a wet heap where someone had cleaned up the water overflow.
So whoever broke the toilet was very responsible. Someone also left money on top of the toilet tank and more cash in the mailbox.
Earl spent January 1 driving to Home Depot and buying a new toilet tank. He installed it and had moved on to shoveling the neighbor's driveway by mid-morning.
And those were just some of the activities that started my New Year.
How bout you?

Changes

My daughter is averse to change. It sends her into a tizzy, and many times, I think I'm not the right kind of mom for her. I have inadequate amounts of patience for her angst.
So the beginning of a new year with the beginning of a new decade were traumatic. Around nine o'clock New Year's eve, she was preparing to leave the party I was at and go to another party. She hugged me and said, "I'm not ready for 2010."
"Well," I said, taking a sip of my pina colada, "you've got another three hours to get ready."
See, probably not too comforting.
2010 is the year she turns 18 and joins the "adult" world. She must picture me with a big pair of scissors cutting the knot between us. She will become adrift in the adult world, forced to make every decision for herself. My mother tells me she hated turning 18 too, so maybe it's genetic.
2010 is the year Grace will graduate from high school and go off to college. These are things to embrace, but she clings to her life, afraid of what may come.
The next morning she was bemoaning that a whole decade had passed. I suppose she may have been old enough to remember New Year's of 2000 when she was 7, almost 8.
"Look," I told her. "You've accomplished so much in the past decade."
Her big eyes looked up, begging me to list her achievements.
"You kept trying out for parts at OperaColumbus until you landed one with the children's chorus. You're in Singers. You do solos at all of the performances. You got a big part in the play and in the upcoming musical. You learned to Irish step dance and continued ballet until you were 12. You can ride a horse and jump the horse, plus you won ribbons for it."
Grace and her dance partner perform at the Ohio Statehouse.
I continued to think of all the things she'd done in the past 10 years. Sailing and swimming and geography bees. Switching from home school to high school was painful, but she has succeeded.
"The only time you need to look back on a decade and regret that it's gone is if you are still in the same place you were when it started," I said.
"If you are sitting at the kitchen table in front of our laptop the morning of 2020 then you need to rethink your decade," I said, looking at her in front of the smooth wood table.
She smiled, a wry smile.
She seemed not to hate the new decade as much and I hope eventually she'll be able to embrace changes, at least the good ones that move her life forward inch by inch.

New Year's Blah, Blah, Blah

I know. I hate New Year's Resolutions too. So I'm not making any -- that I actually think I'll keep.
Cause here's how it will go, I'll make them and break them and then feel guilty. I don't need any more guilt in my life. I know what I need to do. I need to write more and run more and love my family more. Done.
I like the way this old year is ending. I like having extra money in the bank account so I can pay any bills that fly this way. Ka-ching.
I've got some great ideas for my novel, now I just actually need to sit down and write them.
That's why, when I heard boys voices at 5 a.m., I pulled myself out of bed. Yes, I spent an hour happily paying bills online and looking at the blogosphere, but now I'm ready to finish this post and keep working on my novel.
The boy voices make me kind of sad that they decided to end the old year by staying up all night. Six of them, 15 and 16-year-olds in the basement, playing Xbox and watching bad sitcom reruns. The Grape Crush bottle lays empty on the granite countertop. Boy shoes big enough for the cats to ride in bunch together at the top of the basement stairs. One boy is coughing, probably allergic to cats.
I hoped that maybe Spencer, perenially tired from all that growing, had gone to sleep, leaving some of the the younger boys to carouse all night. Then I heard his laugh.
It's good to hear boys laugh too.
They're quiet now at 6:30 a.m., but I'll wake them all by 8:30 as I head out the door to get Tucker to swim team. I'll send them home to sleep away the last day of the old year, then awake in time to celebrate the new.
As for me, I'll spend the morning with my husband, a little post Christmas shopping and returns. We'll have lunch together, maybe fish and chips or Shepherd's Pie at the Irish place in the Brewery District, and come home to watch some football bowl games before he heads off to work.
My friend Sheila is having a party so I plan to go over there with my six-pack of Smirnoff Ice. Oops! Make that a 5-pack since I drank one last night.
Here's a picture of Tupi starting his New Year celebration way too early. Grace wants to have friends over, and, although they're a very tame crowd, I'll probably feel it necessary to come back home and chaperone long before midnight.
This has been a good year. I've worked a lot. I've posted a lot on my blog. I've packed away one novel but have a good start on the next. I've run a lot of miles and shared those miles with friends. I've seen my kids grow and make plans for the future.
2010 is going to be a doozy. I hope I remember to enjoy it.
Happy New Year to everyone and thanks for reading.