Quote of the Day:

“If you ain’t the lead dog, the scenery never changes.” –Lewis Grizzard

Christmas came and went, you may have heard, so did the turning of the New Year and though I understand there is some debate over it, so did the decade change. TB as you may know is a slave to meaningless milestones. And so for several days I planned my fast start to the twenty-tens (we are calling it that, right?) I laid out a week’s worth of essay topics, made a list of all family business that was overdue and planned my first work week down to the hour. It was time to start fresh, to get ahead, seize the bull by the horns, go for the gusto, head for the mountains, tastes great, less fillin’, etc, etc. And then began the aches, then a bit of fever, then chills, a mild cough–I’ll be damned if I ain’t sick, and not some old-fashioned plain ‘ol cold either, but a real sickness over which I ought to have my ass sitting in some dread physician’s clinic instead of contaminating this poor keyboard with my plague. But I ain’t sick enough for that yet. Maybe tomorrow, after its too late for Tamiflu to do any good. Or maybe it’ll pass.

All of this to say, the TBU must grow or die. And so I post a few randoms that may have made for good essays if I felt like thinking about them for a bit. Instead, I submit them to you to glean from whatever wisdom, beauty and truth you may.

New Year’s Resolutions–For me, a renewed commitment to drastically reducing the intake of Diet Coke. For the family, to cook more and to exercise together. And I always like to have one lofty goal. Mine’s a two-parter–to coalesce these random TBU essays into something of a unified work, possibly fiction, or maybe as a memoir. And to submit some of my work to someone who either crushes or creates dreams, as the case may be. More interestingly, my five-year old niece is committing herself to quit biting her toenails.

Travellin–The gang just returned to Ridgeland last night, in time for a Mississippi Blizzard. The snow is, as I type, sticking to the corners of my roof at the rate of….um….barely but truly visible. Hooray! More White Death in the forecast for Thursday. But as for the travellin, we spent the week after Christmas mainly in Charleston. But we also took a side trip to Savannah, Georgia, for the night and Beaufort, South Carolina for another night. I got a good look at the low country on the way down and I finally “get” why people from thereabouts love it so much. It’s really a beautiful, peaceful swath of mud soaked real estate. Savannah, with its many and ancient city squares surrounded by colonial, federal and antebellum era architecture, majestic churches and imposing banking institutions is now the prettiest town I’ve ever visited. I never really thought about whether Sherman burned the place, but assumed he had. It sure didn’t look like it so I asked and no, he left it intact, much to our collective benefit as Americans. In the same conversation I learned that Charleston was controlled by the Union occupation of Fort Sumpter and was never fought over. It wasn’t even occupied until after the Confederate surrender. Again, I’m thankful for this as the town is full of history and beauty, but I’m also a little hacked. South Carolina started the whole damn thing after all and basically got out of it without a scratch in comparison to the lemmings that followed behind. South Carolina, you’re on notice. If you hadn’t brought Steven Colbert into my life you’d be dead to me. Well Colbert and my toenail-chewin’ niece.

Finally, my freakin phone died, for real. I went to set it down in the car and put it straight into a cup of water. I pulled it out in a millisecond, but that won’t make me feel any better when I shell out two honey buns for a replacement. Might as well have threw it in the ocean. We actually had the thing working for three days, then–kaput. And that awesome list I had to work on this week involved a bunch of phone calls that needed making too, dangit.