BIG MONDAY

I love that 2007 is starting on a monday. I always like new things like diets and carefully schemed plans for world domination to begin on mondays -- it's kind of like starting a fresh notebook for a new idea. It's like an empty hallway to dance down, with nothing in your way. So: 2007. Hello! A monday. Perfect! I have a few more days to gather my wits before Big Monday. What will I scheme this year? My resolutions were the same for so long, and unfulfilled for so long I stopped making them out of shame. They were still there of course, like tiny little letters written on the ceiling you needed to climb a ladder and read with a magnifying glass** but I stopped announcing them, even to myself. And then, one year, I did the impossible. I accomplished them. A year ago today, I was riding the tail end of a year that had seen both of my resolutions accomplished. One was to write a novel. The other was. . . (you'll never have heard this one before) to lose weight.

I felt GREAT. Powerful. The year that followed, 2006, was a good year too. Exciting and full. I saw my book as an actual book for the first time. I got cracking on the next book. I had a little more money than I was accustomed to having. All good things, but nothing so resounding as finishing and selling my first novel AND losing weight! In fact, I gained some of the weight BACK. And here I am again, another New Year's, with my same old goals hanging over my head: finish a [different] novel, and lose [different] weight.

Why can't goals stay accomplished? Sigh. This time at least I know I can do it. And thank you, universe, for aligning to start the year out cleanly on a monday. I have many more thoughts and hopes about the coming year, and I will write more about them before Big Monday. I'm just easing myself into these thoughts about change, about habits and hopes for new accomplishments. A new year lying ahead is a beautiful thing. In my mind it is an oval, kind of like a racetrack, with summer and winter as the roundabouts, and fall and spring as the straightaways. I don't know why I see it that way, but I always have.

I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday. I did! And I have high hopes that the quality of photography on my blog is going to increase drastically, since Jim gave me a new camera for Christmas. Yaaayyy! Thanks, sweetie! I am deeply in love with it, oohing and aahing and wanting to take pictures of everything. And yes, I know Christmas isn't all about the gift giving. But still, what fun! The giving part and the receiving part. I am unashamed to say I love it all, and that for me Christmas isn't a religious occasion, but a reason to gather together and cook with my loved ones and laugh and eat cookies and give presents and yes, get presents! I love stuff and I won't pretend otherwise! Cake stands and felt purses, black dresses and Moroccan leather foot stools, dolls and silver pomegranates, wine and sharp knives and chandeliers that dangle blue beach glass. And books, lots of books! Beautiful, wonderful things!!! Now, of course, comes the part of figuring out where to put new things, which inevitably leads to craving a bigger house. Ha ha! Not this year!

**What's all that about tiny letters on a ceiling? It's nothing to do with anything, but I read somewhere how John Lennon and Yoko Ono met: he attended a gallery opening of hers which included an installation of a ladder you had to climb to use a magnifying glass to read a tiny word printed on the ceiling. The word was "yes." John Lennon later said that if the word had been, say, "no," he would not have made an effort to meet the artist. And how differently things would have gone! So: "yes!"


(Birthday roses, pic taken with my new camera!)