Happy New Year!

"Happy new year, happy new year! May we all have our hopes, our will to try"
Abba ~ Happy New Year

To all of my readers, near and far, I hope you all have a wonderful, joyful, fulfilling, clean (cleanliness is next to Godliness, after all), relatively stress-free, and body-rocking 2009!

I usually don't have huge overwhelming new year's resolutions, instead I like to create a little ten-point list, much like the famous Adrian Mole. So below you will find, in no particular order, those things I intend to improve on:

1. Wash my car more often than twice a year, and remember to get it buffed and waxed on a regular basis too. It costs less than $10, and I could probably get husband-dear to do it, so I'm not quite sure why my car looks like it's been through hell and back. Since my car is essential to my job, and thus my life, I promise to definitely take better care of it in 2009.
2. Stop the annoying habit of keeping one knee-high when the other one has a run in it. I do this out of frugality (well, if one more knee-high gets a run, I'll have a spare to make a pair), but in practice this means I'm left with a drawer full of non-matching knee-highs, that I never end up wearing anyway.
3. Stop saying "like" so much. For some reason, when I learned English in the 1980s, everyone said "like", like all the time. And in spite of my years, my advanced education, and my bookworm-ishness, I still use it far too often, sounding more like a grown-up Valley Girl, or someone from "The Hills" or "Made" than, well, someone I would like to be, you know, say professional, educated, and with an expansive vocabulary. So "like" has got to go.
4. Leave work when I tell husband-dear I will. Although I love my students (and co-workers), I really need to learn to be less like that unfortunate Ado Annie and say "no" a little more often.
5. At my husband's desperate request, I have to remember that when I ask him "Did I tell you about the time that.." and he says "yes", there is no need for me to not continue the story. It's apparently very annoying.
6. Bring my cellphone when I run. The past year has proven that it is very easy to get lost in this part of the world, and that running can be quite a hazardous experience as well. And not just because some people just don't pay attention when driving, but also because some locals apparently take sport in running as many runners off the road as possible. I can't tell you how many times I ended up crouched in a ditch wishing I had a cellphone so I could call the cops on some redneck kid in an oversized pick-up truck
7. Stop being obsessive and accept six resolutions when I really wanted to have five. Or ten. Or some pretty number.

Happy 2009!