Okay! Are we ready? It is time.

Last year I resolved to use my reusable bags more often, and even though I totally forgot I had resolved it, I nevertheless did it. I am now at Current Maximum Reusable Bag Usage for me, which means I use reusable bags at the use-percentage that still leaves me with enough plastic bags for my various plastic-bag-needing needs. I carry two fold-small reusable bags in my purse, and I take a big huge sack of reusable bags with me to the grocery store. I don’t use a produce bag if I’m buying just one or two of some non-messy produce (like a green pepper) and/or I use reusable produce bags, and I say “Oh, I can just put it in this other bag” if I’m buying an item at the mall that can be put into a bag I already have. To sum up: mold a golden idol in my image.

I resolved last year to think more before buying something. Again, I forgot that the motivation for doing this was a resolution, but I still did SOME of this. I tried to think to myself, “Yes, $1.74 is a great deal for a shirt, but he does not actually NEED any more shirts,” and “A whole bunch of $1.74s add up to extra sent to the mortgage” and “Won’t it be nice for someone ELSE to find this deal?” and “You know, actually I need to get rid of some of the shirts he already has because there isn’t room in the drawer on the rare occasions I get caught up on laundry.” On the other hand, it led to several regrets, like when William grew into the same size of shirts and pajamas Rob is wearing, and now they each have half of the supply.

I forgot to drink champagne more often, and in fact I haven’t had any since last New Year’s Eve. I will see if I can cram a whole year’s worth of champagne into this evening.

I resolved last year to at least open my Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Workbook for Dummies to where I’d left off, and I did, and in fact I skimmed to the end, but I didn’t find any other gems of insight. So actually I was right when I stopped reading it the first time.

I’d resolved to throw out the $5 giant bottle of lotion I hated and replace it with the $5 giant bottle of lotion I liked, and I did that.

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Now! Time for 2011 resolutions! And I know this will seem CRAZY, but I’m going to ONCE AGAIN do resolutions that do NOT involve losing weight or exercising more! Not only do those sorts of resolutions tend to be extremely boring (especially when made year after year with no follow-though), there are many, MANY other parts of a human being that can be worked on!

1. I will try to be less of a self-conscious sissy about hair dye. I keep intending to go, say, burgundy, and then thinking, “Oh, wait, but there is a parent-teacher conference coming up!” or “Oh, but it’ll be Christmas!” It seems totally reasonable to avoid going a crazy color right before a wedding in which I’m a member of the bridal party, or maybe before a childbirth where I want to look a certain way in new-baby photos, but there are very few other occasions that require this level of burgundy-avoidance.

2. I will try to be more caught up on trimming/editing digital photos. I tend to be three or four months behind, just chronically. And as I regularly think when someone is tailgating me: if you’re going at a steady pace regardless, you might as well be at a more pleasant distance. For tailgating, that’s FARTHER; for digital photos, that’s CLOSER.

3. I’m going to try this fish tank thing enough to see if it’s something I want to pursue or if it’s something I want to give up.

4. I’m going to act with less inhibition on generous impulses. I’m going to spend less time wringing my hands wondering if my impulse to send someone a present is going to make them feel uncomfortable or obligated, or if a fun giveaway will make some people roll their eyes and write about how stupid they think blog giveaways are. What a stupid waste of hand-wringing.

5. I’m going to find more Bath & Body Works discontinued lavender-vanilla conditioner on eBay and see if it’s worth buying. The ones I bought 2 years ago are almost used up. If it’s too expensive or hard to find, I will try experiments such as mixing Bath & Body Works lavender-vanilla oil/lotion with unscented conditioner, or using the lotion directly. [Same-day follow-up: I researched on eBay and you would not believe what people think they can charge for this stuff. FORTY-ONE DOLLARS for four TRAVEL SIZE bottles. Bitch, please. So I’m moving right on to experimenting.]

6. I will no doubt add some sixth thing.

7. And probably a seventh thing. It happens every year, so I might as well add place-holders.

I’m also resolving to frame my resolutions and hang them on the wall, but I don’t want to put that as one of the resolutions because that is too meta for my current fill-level of champagne.

If you still need some resolutions for your own list, perhaps you would like some of these others I’ve used in the past?

1. Try ONE cloth pad and see if it’s something I like or something I can stop thinking of as “something I want to do someday.”

2. Try ONE cloth napkin and see if it’s something I like or something I can stop thinking of as “something I want to do someday.”

3. Pretend to invest $1000 in the stock market. Choose stocks and follow them as if I’d bought them. At the end of the year, decide whether to invest real money or if it’s something I can stop thinking of as “something I want to do someday.”

4. Have a baby.

5. Learn to knit, enough to see if it’s something I want to pursue or something I can stop thinking of as “something I want to do someday.”

6. Try Postcrossing, enough to see if it’s something I want to pursue or something I can stop thinking of as “something I want to do someday.”

7. Pass along nice things I hear about someone.

8. Use reusable bags more often.

Happy New Year, everybody! I better post this before I start typing embarrassing songs.

The trouble with resolutions is that I forget all about them. Like, did you know that last year I resolved to pass along good things I hear about people? ME NEITHER! It was a total surprise to me to read that just now!

You know what would be cool, would be to write our resolutions on a piece of paper and frame that paper somewhere we’d see it all the time. Then each year, replace the piece of paper. Not only would this be kind of fun (choosing the frame, decorating the paper), it might, like, WORK.

So I think I’m going to do that, if I can think of any resolutions. I guess I could reuse last year’s, since they seem completely fresh and unused.

OMG CALENDAR-CHOOSING TIME!! at Milk and Cookies. I love love love choosing a calendar. I have tons of good options but am so reluctant to SETTLE on one—but also getting panicky as they start selling out. [Edit: I made myself CHOOSE ONE ALREADY. I got Sibley birds, a dark horse candidate.] What are you getting this year?

Review blog stuff: review of MasterCard MarketPlace [link removed because review blog is gone], with a $100 gift card giveaway. That would help with a little holiday debt right there. Just a couple more days left for that one.

One of my manual tweets from the other day was “We felt our fish were insufficiently happy, so we spent $80.”

We had a 2.5-gallon tank, with two tiny minnows in it (the kind that look exactly like goldfish ((to us)) but have a much smaller maximum expected adult size) (not the kind that turn into frogs: that’s tadpoles). We went to the pet store to buy new filters for the tank, and we saw they had the 14-gallon tank kit marked from $90 down to $40, and we said, “Oh, okay.” Then we bought more stuff to put in it, because there was more room in the new tank for stuff. Plus we needed to buy larger filters.

I’d been planning to get a larger tank (the smaller one was a test, to see if we were a family that would enjoy pet fish), but I’d been balking because the tank KIT (which I wanted so I wouldn’t have to make decisions about a filter and a light and a heater and a lid and etc.) is so much more expensive than the plain TANK, which periodically goes on a “$1/gallon” sale (but then requires the filter decision and the heater decision and so forth, which makes me do Panicky Math, and Panicky Math leads to “Never mind! Forget it!”).

Darn it and also yay: I just went on Amazon to see if they had the tank so I could show you the kit-ness of it, and they don’t have the same tank (here’s the 10-gallon version, which our 14-gallon tank brags about being “40% larger than,” and thank you for doing that DIFFICULT and EXTREMELY USEFUL math, Aqueon!), but they do have the replacement filters for 2/3rds of the SALE price I just paid for them at the pet store. Well, in six months I’m getting a GREAT DEAL on replacement filters, MARK MY WORDS.

So we brought the new tank home, and the first step was finding a new place for the fish tank to live: a 2.5-gallon tank holds about 20 pounds of water so it can live on a book shelf, but a 14-gallon tank is about 112 pounds of water and needs something I would let someone Rob’s size JUMP on). We’re using a heavy 1970s dark pine cabinet we bought at Goodwill for 1/4th the price of an on-sale fish tank kit, back when we were in the first half of our 20s.

Then it was a matter of moving the fish. I don’t know if you have ever done fish, but they are a bit tricky. They live in WATER, you see. Transferring them from one water to another water (especially when the first water is in a nice nitrogen cycle and the new water is not) is risky and difficult. It took a couple of days, but now they are in their new tank:

You cannot see the fish in this picture.
This is because one of them is in the “broken jug” and the other is behind a plant.
It is not because I am just pretending to have pet fish.
Of what use would that be?

And we are on Dead Fish watch. We want to add more fish now that we have room, and we are thinking we might even use the heater so we can add something other than minnows or goldfish, but we need to wait awhile to make sure this new water is working out. (I feel nervous about really filling it all the way to the top the way the instructions say. I also feel nervous about not following instructions. We’ll see what conquers what.)

Notice that our new tank has, along with a new “broken jug” and the old turret and a couple of new fake plants, a T-rex. Henry wanted to do a whole dinosaur theme (there was also a stegosaurus and some other dinosaur, plus two dinosaur skeletons), but I am not yet sure about Tank Decor and didn’t want to commit to dinosaurs.

Now, I have a question for those of you who have experience with fish. No, two questions. No, THREE questions:

1. Should I get them some taller plants?

2. If we do start using the filter and branching out into freshwater fish, what’s a good type to add first?

3. Really? Fill it all the way to the bottom of the black rim?

Because of a GOOD thing (upgrading a computer Paul called “steam-powered”), I was without computer/internet for a day. It was like a power outage: I kept thinking, “Well, since I can’t work on blogs, I’ll get caught up on email….oh. Well, I’ll set up the fish tank. Hm, I’ll go Google whether it’s bad to put them close the the television…oh.” And I had to do Twitter MANUALLY:

My family celebrates on Christmas Eve night (I’m not sure if this is from the Dutch ancestry or the minister ancestry), so we are already relaxing and enjoying all our presents while you suckers are trying to get a shower and a cup of coffee in the midst of the chaos. My favorite parts of Christmas:

Cards around the doorway between living room and kitchen.

OMG UNDERWEAR IN STOCKING!!!
MOST HILARIOUS THING EVER!!!

Heading out for annual Christmas lights drive in pajamas.

Children reading new books, playing new video games,
looking at new coloring books,
while Mother has a latte and Cheetos for breakfast.

Non-favorite part: slipping on a step and hitting several subsequent steps with my buttular region SO HARD I have a bruise the size of a LARGE YAM. This is the only time I have ever been tempted to post a picture of my butt on the internet, because I would really love to get some big sympathy for this. I asked Paul if he wanted to see it and he was like “OH-kay! *waggling eyebrows”* and then he totally divebombed into “OOOOOO, GEEZ, AGGGG!!” I am not kidding when I say I can’t SIT, not because sitting is so painful (though it kind of is) but because getting UP again is too painful. I am kneeling on my sideways computer chair, elbows resting on the armrest, hunched over the keyboard like a butt-injured Christmas vulture.

My before-I-even-knew-what-blogging-WAS friend Firegirl was asking about favorite Christmas songs and I was trying to choose one (fail), and that reminded me of how one of my favorites is a song I didn’t used to like at all. I used to think Winter Wonderland was an extremely boring song, and also lame, but then I bought one of those Scholastic multi-book packs of Christmas books and one of them was Winter Wonderland, which was a book to SING. And this was when I had two children, and I used to read to them before bed (now Paul does reading duty), and I let each of them choose one book and then I’d read both books to both of them, and anyway my point here is that they kept choosing that Winter Wonderland book over and over, and I realized it was a very pleasing song to sing and right in my range. But more importantly, I realized it was a song about an ENGAGEMENT. I’d been picturing children outside making a snowman and calling it Parson Brown, but it’s NOT children, it’s a couple! And they go on a walk, and they start joking around about how the snowman is asking them if they’re married and they say no but that he can do the job when he’s in town. MAD FLIRTY!! And then later on they’re all snuggled up by the fire and they “face unafraid the plans that we made” while out walking! So the joking around is what helps them to discuss it for reals!! Isn’t that ROMANTIC?? So anyway, now I love the song. Except the verses about the circus clown and the Eskimo way, because those are totally not on topic.

I have Do They Know It’s Christmas? stuck in my head, and you’re welcome. (You should watch it if only to admire Hottt 1984 Era Sting, who is looking pretty cute in that video especially compared to the boys who were under the influence not only of Earnest Face but also of certain unfortunate hair trends.)

I remember hearing this song in…let’s see, how old was I? It came out when I was in middle school, but I don’t remember hearing it until high school: I went to a religious middle school where even Christian rock was frowned upon, and when I say “frowned upon” I mean “actively campaigned against by the teachers, with guest lectures about how we could tell the devil was directly involved by listening to the particular type of beat.” (I listened to my Michael W. Smith album anyway, which, now that I’ve thought of this, finally gives me a good answer to the question about why I ended up Leaving the Flock. “It was the beat, the beat, the crazy devil-worshiping BEAT of ‘Old Enough to Know’!!”)

So anyway, I heard “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” when I was at the public high school, probably while walking to school listening to my WALKMAN, which played CASSETTES I made by recording songs off the radio. And I remember hearing “And there won’t be snow in Africa this Christmastime…” and thinking, “Yeah, but….I mean, snow isn’t really the issue, is it? There are areas of the United States that don’t get snow at Christmastime either. And actually, for people who don’t even have enough clothes and food, that’s probably GOOD to not have snow and cold and ice.” I also remember trying to understand why the singers seemed to want to know the answer to the question of the title. Do they…”know” it’s Christmas? Why? Would that make a difference? Should we…tell them? Like, just in case? (None of this stopped me from listening to it 40 billion times.)

As an adult I get what they were trying to do (i.e., “Get in on the ’80s Group Empathy Rock trend”), but “the Christmas bells that ring there are the clanging chimes of doom” seems comically over-the-top (why would impoverished people spend money on clanging chimes of doom?), and I’m not sure the songwriter’s suggestion to the listener (i.e., thanking God it’s them instead of you) will solve the problem as it’s been presented. The second solution, “Feed the world,” is somewhat better, but lacks instructions for practical application: okay, I have some food, I’m standing in the world….now what?

Such a perplexing song. To hear it you’d think the main issues in Africa (which, incidentally, is kind of a big place, and my geography knowledge has always been a little shaky but I’ll bet it isn’t COMPLETELY without rain or rivers ANYWHERE) were (1) They don’t get snow at Christmastime, (2) They don’t know it’s Christmas, and (3) Bells of doom keep clanging.

May I suggest that if Shelly Overlook has a contest, you enter? She said “gift from Disney World” and I pictured…key ring? Instead, look:

RIGHT?? There is:

1. a 2010 Minnie Mouse holiday pin that looks like an ornament (which I plan to use as an ACTUAL ornament—how’s THAT for mind-twisting?)

2. a bag of Goofy sour gummy worms

3. a TAPESTRY THROW FTLOG

4. and, my favorite, a green handbag with a bow on it, and I wish you could see it with the lining, which is purple argyle (you can see a glimpse of the purple color peeking out under the bow)

You are so jealous right now.

PSA time. It seems there are two major misconceptions about the flu vaccine:

1. That it prevents all strains of flu, and without fail. (It’s a concoction based on the strains predicted most likely to appear that year, and the vaccine won’t work for every single person even if the predicted flu strains are correct.)

2. That it prevents “stomach flu.” (“The flu,” short for influenza, is respiratory. “Stomach flu” is not influenza at all, so the vaccine doesn’t prevent it. I don’t know why it’s called flu, because it isn’t.)

Now you know. *musical trill*

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New gift idea posts at Milk and Cookies:

1. Non-toy gift ideas for children.

2. Gift ideas for 9-12-year-old boys. I mean, are they impossible to buy for OR WHAT?

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My littler children had gingerbread houses and milk for breakfast. WHAT?