Counting down...

..to 2010.

Wait! Before you go on, you have to know - this post has a soundtrack. You have to page down to the bottom and play the embedded video while you're reading. Well, OK, you don't have to, but a) it was the music I was listening to while I composed it, b) it's a good song, and c) Mark Knopfler and Dire Straits kicked the living dog pee out of the Eighties. Man could carry his axe. Seriously. Say what you want about the Eighties, but some of the music whaled ass like crazy monkeys.

Anyway. I've gotta tell you - I'm pretty much ready to kick 2009 square in the seat of the pants. Outside of my family's welfare, the year pretty much sucked donkey butt. War, recession, Michael Jackson...did we miss ANY of the Four Horsemen?

Feh.

I'm thinking about the New Year. Should we resolve to NOT be 2009? And what should those resolutions be?

While we're thinking about this, here's some pictures from the past week:Little Miss digs into her presents Christmas morning.

Little Girl is a caution; she's gotten the hang of possessiveness and greed, the Big Two of the preschool Trinity (the third is self-absorption, but that was on display a bit, too...) but she still has some curious holes in her style and Christmas displays them to perfection.

She still doesn't "get" the whole idea of massive kid loot. She opens a present, sees it's something she likes, wants to play with it. The kiddo just can't seem to really get her head around the outside of the notion that all those things over there? They're for her.

This little man doesn't have that problem.

He ripped through all his Santa loot and commenced to whining about the fact that HER "Barbie Bedroom" as physically larger than any of the forty zillion things that HE got (oh, and Grandma and Grandpa? Thomas the Train was SO last year. Boy now sneers at all things Thomas. Which isn't say that we won't treasure the Thomas books in the two days it takes them to make their way to the Goodwill...) to the point where he was put in the bilboes (or sent to his room, which is as close as we come around here). He emerged but was fairly sulky all morning, adopting what has become a very common attitude for him; festering discontent.

How a child with the toys he has can be bored is beyond me.

Taken all together, Santa's Totenreit was no better or worse than last year except we weren't buried ass-deep in the bloody snow. I did miss little girl's excited bouncing from last year and her wonderful expressions from the year before that.

Here's an oddity.This is a plant. Brought home from his afterschool program by the Boy. Described to me as "either a red flower or a bean plant, I don't remember."

Yeah, it's a bean.

The great green ampelopsis ("Suburban plant that climbs by suction. You know – first year, tender little shoots – second year, fine show – next year, all over the shop.") has taken over the windowsill in the kitchen and is still, amazingly, growing out of it's original tiny paper cup. I need to transplant it, or let it wither.

But the sheer vitality of the damn thing impresses the hell out of me. Don't tell me about the precious fragility of life, goddamit. Life is one persistently pernicious fucker, bursting out rudely wherever it can and often where it can't and shouldn't; the little bean plant seems like a pretty good avatar for all those Congressional sex scandals, faith-healing miracles and ecclesiastical prohibitions. Deny it or defer it as you please - rude life will find a way to burst out and swarm its lusty tendrils all over you. And you can learn to appreciate it, or get out of its way. There really isn't much else to choose...

And speaking of choosing, here's poor Miss Lily not choosing to be the faux-reindeer-antlered Christmas Kitty. She REALLY hated these things, but was a good enough kitty to pose with them long enough for me to snap the picture. Poor little moggy, she didn't get anything for Christmas except her usual bowl of catfood and that late, as well.

And yet she manages to refrain from sneering at us fallible humans.

Well, it's after midnight now, and I'm for bed. Let's get together again on the last day of 2009 to ponder the Passing Year a bit and make some Resolutions for the New.

Oh, and here's the music. Five, six, seven, eight...G'night.