Happy 2010, y'all.

Things accomplished so far:
* a batch of chopped liver
* first draft of this Sunday's sermon
* a revision, a freewrite, and 360 words of intro I'm probably going to junk
* a 13-hour overnight shift for Room in the Inn, which included sorta watching the Sugar Bowl, a fair amount of crocheting, and working on aforementioned sermon and other bits of writing
* a note to my favorite 87-year-old

Things still missing from 2009:
* the packet of Claritin-D I purchased last week
* my slippers

Things enjoyed so far:
* chopped liver with beets and greens
* my mother-in-law's fruitcake
* Dar Williams's Promised Land (the BYM: "Hey, it's not Ann Murray!")
* crawling into a cocoon of flannel sheets with a heat-radiating BYM therein
* the cafe curtains the BYM installed in the dining room yesterday
* a note from my favorite Detroit poet (hi Rae!)
* returning to Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant (a book I'd started reading earlier in 2009, but then set aside due to various distractions). From Haruki Murakami's "The Year of Spaghetti":

Spring, summer, and fall, I cooked away, as if cooking spaghetti were an act of revenge. Like a lonely, jilted girl throwing old love letters into the fireplace, I tossed one handful of spaghetti after another into the pot.

I'd gather up the trampled-down shadows of time, knead them into the shape of a German shepherd, toss them into the roiling water, and sprinkle them with salt. Then I'd hover over the pot, oversized chopsticks in hand, until the timer dinged its plaintive tone.

Spaghetti strands are a crafty bunch, and I couldn't let them out of my sight. If I were to turn my back, they might well slip over the edge of the pot and vanish into the night. Like the tropical jungle waits to swallow up colorful butterflies into the eternity of time, the night lay in silence, hoping to waylay the prodigal strands.