New Year, New Date On Our Checks

Just kidding, who uses checks?  I write maybe 3 checks a year and every time I do, I'm filled with rage that I can't just use a card or Venmo them.  It's really a me problem, though.  I can still feel my bowels releasing when I think about the time someone stole my outgoing mail that contained a Christmas card with a check for the trash collector guys AND also accidentally a blank check because I have no motor control or attention to detail and tore off two checks instead of one.  That was a fun series of phone calls to the police and the bank.  Oh I think about it and just laugh and laugh.

Speaking of remembering the good times, I fell down a memory well on New Year's Eve, like the Baby Jessica of Reminiscing.  I dragged out some old photo albums from high school, from the glory days of disposable cameras, and found some real gems.  

Party like it's literally 1999

On the eve of Y2K, my mom wouldn't let me go to the christian youth cult party that my friends were attending at the Grange down the street because she thought there'd be drinking and drugs and also the world was going to end in a fiery blaze of 1s and 0s (in which case, what harm could a little malt liquor and ecstasy do?).  Meanwhile, she went out for the night, so it was just me and Iowa sitting at home to get our Dick Clark on.  She took pity on me and cooked a fancy lobster dinner and took this photo of me in my homecoming dress with Millennium Snoopy, which begs the question if I am 14 years old and THIS sheltered AND was recently subjected to the DARE program, what nefarious things could I have possibly gotten into?  I would have eaten 37 cupcakes and hoovered a full liter of Mountain Dew, then come home and played Minesweeper until 6 am, that's what.  

So the Y2K New Year came and went without incident, just as 2022 rolled over to the year 2023.  I fell asleep reading in bed at 11:30 and woke up at midnight to the thunderous overture of fireworks AND gunshots, which is kind of the East Nashville equivalent of having your cake and eating it too, or seeing Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny in the mall at the same time.  Or perhaps a better analogy is seeing Chris and Liam Hemsworth in the same place, because from a distance, they are pretty hard to tell apart, but when you can compare them side by side, they are obviously very different.  Except I don't have to check my car for holes from stray bullets falling out of the sky when the Hemsworth brothers stand next to each other.  

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Many bloggers post recaps of the past year, and set resolutions/goals/intentions/mantras for the year ahead.  I'm not here to do any of that, because it usually bites me in the ass.  However, I do want to share just one thing that I'm proud of.

Behold my only accomplishment of 2022*:  I read 61 books.  For real, though, I read the unabridged version of Stephen King's The Stand, and that mess should have counted for at least 4 books. I read about 8 books when I was locked away in a tower to contain my never-ending plague, and honestly, my only regret about finally falling victim was that it happened in the summer and not in January.  Give me about a week back at work once the kids return, and if I don't actually get sick, I'll probably start thinking a little trip to the ol' infirmary doesn't sound so bad.**

Here's my annual book count since I started keeping score, for all zero of you who are interested:

2019: 60

2020: 63

2021: 65

2022: 61

2023: ???

* I guess before my mom chimes in in the comments, I did accomplish other things.  I got the Wordle in ONE once, I had an essay about shoplifting published in a humor newsletter, and I was voted Teacher of the Year at work.

**Kinda makes you curious about the aforementioned accomplishment, doesn't it?  Yea, me too, pal.