As promised, a list of ideas/projects to consider for 2008. I know, most people have already made their new year's lists and forgotten them by now. But in my defense I have to say that the New Year's holiday is pretty much the TIME OF INTENSITY for my industry, which is the industry of salty, exspensive preserved foods. So I needed to recover and stop thinking about caviar and all its saline bretheren. My first thought was to try and bring to life the Transcendental Promised Land that Louisa May Alcott created in "Little Men". My second thought was that my first thought was a bit crazy. What follows is the culmination of my third thought, which seems to be the most fish-egg-free thought I have had all day.

1. Look into the many crevices of my brain to try and find a new name for this website. I no longer am the mother of a choogling toddler and frankly, the name no longer amuses me.

2. Find a competent pediatrician for Austin. Our current doctor is an idiot.

3. Paint our apartment. But which color? I don't know!

4. Learn a bit more about color theory, which will make #3 a more successful project.

5. Spend one evening a week learning how to draw with David, who is a really good draw-er.

6. I would like to publish something somewhere that is not my own website or the local paper in the town I grew up in. Or if I publish something yet again in the Nashua Telegraph, I would like them to pay me for it. Moon shooting, no?

7. Knititng, more and better knitting. Classy knitting, even.

8. Spend more time with my glamorous amazing friends. These good people include freakishly talented cooks, writers, artists, musicians, winos, intellectuals and various types of revolutionaries. I do not know why I hide from them.

9. Find a job that can pay me more than approximately thirty thousand dollars a year. But it can't stick me behind a desk, and it can't mind if I stand up and yell occasionally. If it involves some sort of fungus or fermentation or live animals, so much the better.

10. Make rootbeer at home.