with olive oil and salt and pepper

I'm so A+ thumbs up and all encouraging mumbles about your new year resolutions, if you (dear reader) are the resolving sort. I make vague goals, like fortune cookies, that could apply, or not, to any year.

It has been brought to my attention (by many, no worries it isn't just *you*) that my hair is getting very gray. Yes, I know. Everything is rough *and* I'm old! I know.

Genetics is a fickle bitch. I plucked my first gray hair at 21. It was alarming and I scotch taped it to a book shelf (where it lived until, years later, we sold that bookshelf in a yard sale and someone hefted it away, not knowing of the portentous dna adhered to its side). I don't pluck them anymore. There are too many.

I am younger, but grayer, than many. I am sadder, but funnier, than most. It evens out.

And now here we are. Closing in on the first full week of Two Thousand Ten (tell me you won't say twenty ten. let's be longhanded curmudgeons together, how about it?) and what do I have to show for it? Plans? Peace? Predictions? Nothing.

The new year came and I could pretend, for a couple of days, that life is board games and so many scheming children and bottles and bottles of booze. I'm good at pretending. But now it's any Tuesday and friends are long returned to their regular life and we remain here, in our well worn waiting routine.

We wait. We hope. We roll our eyes at the people who tell us to hope and wait.

Lately, the mister and I have been winding down our evenings with daily doses of The Wire. We've just finished up season 3 and, still, I don't know. I don't know how I feel about being so invested in such bleak lives, such sordid going ons. But three seasons in and such little redemption. Isn't that what we're all looking for, even as we seek to be entertained and removed from the stuff around us?

I want to believe that the good guys will win and that the changing nature of friendships will hold true and that we will all be okay.

And I want every meal to be as simple and satisfying as a dish of baked root vegetables. (a year ago I had never made just roasted beets and turnips and rutabagas and have spent the many following months making up for lost time, so much roasting.)