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.)

12 pictures + 1 song

It was a rotten year. No point in tacking on superlatives, because the funny thing about perspectives is that they're ever shifting (which is a pre-emptive way of saving a little face here. who wants to shriek worst ever or such without beckoning the fates to trot out something more trying, still?).

It was a hard year. But this is it. This is the only year I'll ever be 34 (What? How?) and this is my children's childhoods and this is all we've got. Now. And this year has been, despite the hard and worry and broke and WHAT THE CUSS?! do we do now stuff, as sweet as any year should be. Any year with rain and sun and soil and children and animals and friends and music and love and laughing. And we had all of those things, we did.

I must remember to switch lenses and stop hyperfocusing and pull back and look at the whole thing, every quick snap a tiny pixel making up every memory, every thing that matters. It all matters.

And quick! while I'm all vulnerable and nostalgic and sappy and soft, I will share not any song, but a time traveling song, a song that sounds like going back to when Hope wasn't hope at all, just the naive nature of expecting, assuming, that good things were still to come. Plus, it's kind of hot. (and while this cover is pretty great, the JAMC original is better. but I'm nodding to the out-with-the-old-in-with-the-new theme, on this, the first blog post of the year.)

Two Thousand Ten! I really, really hope it's happy.