How Not to Spend New Year's Day

I guess I'd have to say in the continuum of fear of possible embarrassment that I must be somewhere on the far left of the curve. I am apparently unafraid of airing all my dirty laundry on the world wide web since I'm about to post on how I spent the first day of 2008. I would like to tell anyone that is related to me to stop reading now. (I think that should take care of about 75% of my readers.)

I have a couple of New Year's Day rituals that I like to observe. They really wouldn't mean much to anyone but me, but I like them. They give me the feeling of normalcy that I crave. I may not know anything else that is going to happen in the next year, but I do know what I'll be doing on January 1st.

These include preparing black eyed peas from our garden's summer bounty. I know that eating black eyed peas on New Year's Day is a Southern thing and having grown up with two parents raised in the Midwest/West, it wasn't something that we did. In fact, I'm not sure I ever ate any black eyed peas at all when I was growing up, but sometime after I met TLS, I got into the tradition. Now that I have grown and shelled the peas, it's that much cooler. I also found a great recipe that uses lots of spicy goodness to make them a little more palatable. Black eyed peas in their original state are a tad bland, but put some tobasco and rotel tomatoes in them and zowie! are they good.

The second tradition involves the refrigerator and all those Christmas card pictures I've received during the month of December. (Remember how I said the only Christmas thing I really get into is my Christmas cards? Well, one of the great things about sending them out is that people send theirs to me. Reciprocity. Ain't it great?!) I love getting anything in the mailbox that isn't a bill, catalog, or junk mail, but I especially love it when people put a picture of their kids, their pets or themselves in there. The entire top half of the front of my fridge is covered with Christmas card pictures and every January 1st, I take down the old crop and put up the new one. So, if you send me a picture, I will spend the next year looking at it every single day. I've watched friends' children grow from babies to kids to young adults. Very cool.

I announced to TLS the other day, "I have an idea." This phrase is usually the start of some costly, involved project, but God love him, he's never yet looked at me and said to stick it where the sun don't shine. I do love that man! My current idea had to do with redecorating our master bedroom. I had ordered a new quilt and that meant I'd need to repaint, which meant that we'd need to take down the wallpaper border around the ceiling of our room. And since we were taking that wallpaper down, how about taking down the wallpaper in the kitchen, which was starting to look fairly shabby? TLS agreed to help with the "demolition" projects for New Year's Eve as long as we had some adult beverages to keep us company. Sure thing!

I turned on my iPod to some rockin' playlists and we started stripping wallpaper about 6 p.m. Monday night. We started drinking Bloody Marys about 7 p.m. By 9:30, we were calling all our friends and leaving rambling, incoherent messages or giggling our way through conversations. By 10:30, we had removed all wallpaper from Chez Inertia and had vowed never to replace any of it. By 11:30, we were in bed "asleep" (although comatose would be a more likely description since we never heard the phone ring at 12:20 a.m.). I woke up about 6 a.m. yesterday and stumbled into the bathroom wishing I were dead. The comedian Ron White has a routine where he describes a hangover so bad that it had a name. Mine's was Beealzebub. I got up exactly twice yesterday. I did eat some breakfast, went to lie on the couch, then took a shower and went back to bed. TLS would come in every few hours and ask if I needed anything. (My response was usually something along the lines of "putting me out of my misery" but luckily, he knew I wasn't really serious.)

So, long story short, I accomplished neither one of my New Year's Day rituals because I was an idiot. Resolution for 2008? Keeping away from the vodka.