Is it the reflective time of year already? My how time flies when you only manage to craft one blog post a month for an entire year. Of course, it should be noted that that is completely intentional.
2009 was a pretty good year overall, with the one exception of the current month of December, which has left some deep, ugly grooves in my soul. You see, December 2009 will forever be remembered as the month I lost my mother. After a long and resilient battle with lupus, my mom passed away just a couple of weeks ago. The past couple of weeks been packed with an exceptional amount of things we don’t ordinarily do. Spending an extraordinary amount of time with my father, my siblings, and their children. Sharing memories, laughing, allowing each other to be comfortable with crying around one another, that sort of thing. With Christmas thrown in there somewhere, December 2009 has been fairly bittersweet. But it has strengthened our combined families more than I ever thought possible. And I suppose for that, I should probably thank December 2009. I guess I’ll take that under consideration.
But ultimately, 2009 as a whole was a pretty exceptional year given the fact that it brought us our third beautiful child. Harlyn was born just five scant months ago, and it feels like she’s been with us forever. I suppose I’m thankful that mom was able to spend enough time on Earth to meet her eighth grandchild before passing. We’re already considering all the myriad ways in which we plan to pass the fullness and breadth of my mother’s life and experience on to Harlyn, who will never know her. I’m thinking it may start with a lot of stories, and maybe end with my wife teaching her a few recipes. That will come later, though. Much, much later.
Now, I take a look at the coming year: 2010. The sequel to “A Space Odyssey”. Maybe a metaphor for rebirth and rejuvenation? That’s really for each individual to decide on their own. I’ve loosely assembled an array of thoughts in regards to 2010. They are arranged here in no particular order.
Make our house more livable. Since every attempted sale of our home seems to fall just short of completion, we’ve decided that we need to invest some time, energy, and — ugh — money — into the house in order to make it A) much more livable for us in the short period, and B) more salable in the future. New roof, maybe some windows, some siding, a bit of landscaping. Who knows where the madness will end? All I know is that I’m encouraging the wife as much as possible to get a garden going. She’s been wanting one forever, and has always held off. No longer. 2010 is apparently the year of the Vegetable.
Health and happiness. Along with the potential garden, the wife will be making us eat healthier and (possibly) working out, as well. 2010 is the year that I get back below 200 pounds. Yes, that’s the actual number. No, I don’t necessarily look like it. Yes, it’s all in there somewhere.
Family bonds. As I would hope is usually the case, family will continue to be a priority. Especially now that we’re a bustling, cacophonous band of five jangling automatons. But even beyond the walls of our home, I’m really hoping to spend more time with my siblings and their families in 2010, as well. Since my mom has passed, we’ve all leaned on each other quite a bit for love and support. Honestly, I don’t want that to end anytime soon. I mean, we’ve always been a fairly close-knit bunch. But I want to make sure we all stay very close in touch, get together with everyone at least once a month, if not more often, and especially spend as much time with dad as he will allow. Only good things can come from so much togetherness, I would imagine. Right? Right. We’ll just assume that to be the case.
Reading and writing. This past year I’ve fallen way out of practice on both, unfortunately. I worked pretty hard during the month of October on a short story for a collaboration project with some friends. After much time and discussion, the effort fell apart just short of its planned goal. Nevertheless, I feel words stirring and a restless desire to fit them neatly onto paper. To that end, I’m joining up with some online friends doing their own 365 projects. A 365 project is one where you start with some creative effort on January 1st and do something along those lines every single day until December 31st. My plan is to write one flash-fiction story on my favorite short collaborative fiction site, Ficly, every day of 2010. This will be an especially intriguing effort considering the fact that I will have my wisdom teeth extracted on December 31st, and will likely spend the first couple of days of 2010 as loopy as a sideways loon. But I will nonetheless persevere. On the reading front, I plan to keep up with reading some of the stellar pieces of more recent fiction, likely attaching my interest to those titles that pop up from time to time on John Scalzi’s Big Idea posts. I’ll be starting with The Wind-up Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, a Christmas gift from my wife. I’m considering purchasing a subscription to some scifi/fantasy magazines, as well, such as Asimov’s and Locus. I also really should become a Clarkesworld Citizen, I’ve been grazing their content for free for far so long. My thought is that if I wish to eventually become a scifi/fantasy author, I should probably look the part and actually ingest some of this material that those I hope to one day emulate are in the process of creating. Or something like that.
Gaming. Oh, video games. You are such a vile temptress. I desperately enjoy playing video games, but they suck up so much time, it’s getting really hard to justify. My plan in 2010 is to spend far less time with the Wii since there’s really very little there that I actually want to play, aside from what I already have on my stack. I’ll definitely be spending more time with my DS since there’s a veritable TON of stuff there I want to play, and it is much easier to pick up and play in short bursts.
So, there you have it. So long, 2009. You won’t be missed. Welcome, 2010. Let’s get started, shall we?
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