Are We Doing New Year’s Again This Year?

Oh, yeah, New Years … we’re doing that again this year. And after a century of waiting, we’ll be back into the Roaring Twenties, so there’s that.

The Teen years? As with the teen years of people, they were kind of a combination of good times and deep suckage. Suckage is a word. Okay, it is now.

Politically, there were U.S. Presidents everybody disliked, although at different times. (And that’s all I’ve got to say about that, so let it go.)

Medically–well, as I write this the doctor told me two days ago that I appeared to have a viral respiratory infection. I’d gone in to have my cholesterol checked. (Oh, and my cholesterol is high again.) It was the Decade of the Sinus Infection (which is also the title of my upcoming post-apocalypse novel), with a kidney stone and a few “procedures” thrown in.

Personally, it was the decade a car I owned got totaled for the very first time. Sure, it wasn’t my fault; but neither is Congress, and I suffered from that, too.

But you know what? Great things happened to me in the Teens. It was, after all, 2011 when my first book was published. I got married to my fabulous wife/editor/cover artist/book designer/co-author/whip cracker, Emily. And we replaced the wrecked car with my very first SUV, which I liked way more than I thought I would, and it has a friggin’ computer screen in it, and how cool is that?

Sure, I’ll be helpless when the computers take over, but maybe we should give ’em a chance. They can’t all be like the local malfunctioning change machine.

So what the heck, I’m going to go with the Roaring Twenties starting just as good as last time, and hopefully not ending as bad as last time.

New Year’s resolutions? Nope. I don’t do that. Therein lies madness.

Our dog resolves to keep guarding against invading gnomes. Apparently they taste like chicken.

However, the doctor has also, on two occasions in the last two months, told me I’m about to die (although it wasn’t worded quite that way), so I am taking the occasion to make some mild lifestyle changes.

For instance, did you know it’s possible to have a meal without a salt shaker? It’s true.

Also, the green stuff your parents used to make you eat? Not a form of torture. Who knew?

I draw the line on calling exercise “fun”, but I’ve learned the ways of distracting myself while walking, so there’s that. By the way, audio books would have saved me a lot of falls and bumps on the head when I was younger. Usually the book cushioned the impact.

I can’t call them resolutions, because my plans for 2020 are to simply go on with what I was already doing. Work to pay bills, write to make money to retire so I can write to pay bills, and keep my wife happy so she doesn’t use her sword collection on me, before I’ve made enough money writing so I can retire and still pay bills. If that’s not enough to keep me out of trouble, I don’t know what is.

And before you ask, selling my wife’s sword collection is off the table.