My walls are neither green nor yellow; they’re sort of a middle gray, but there you have it. This is our hearth, decorated for the holiday. Actually, the wire wall art has been up there for quite some time – almost two years, in point of fact. But it looked odd, all off-center like that, so I ordered prints of a couple of our photos from Flickr (this one and this one, to be exact), bought a couple of white frames from Target, and made a neat little gallery presentation out of them. After that, the garland, stockings, and glass manger scene came easy. But if Santa tries to come down this chimney, he’s in for a nasty surprise: it’s walled up. Sometimes Sam will sit with his nose in there for ten minutes or more, standing there like it’s a corner he’s been sent to for punishment. We can’t build a fire in there, but in its absence – and Sam’s – I think it makes a nice little holiday scene. We’re currently working on a project to hang more of our photos up in the dining room; it should be done in a couple days.

It’s December already. That means, of course, that 2007 is coming to a close, and I’m looking back over the list of 107 things I made for myself to do this year. I have to say that although I didn’t get to a great number of those things, I did get to a lot of them, and the Uberlist was a helpful tool in planning my year.

That said, I’m going to tweak the list this year. The original idea of the list was to take the year you’re in, and add the last number of it to 100, and make a list of that many things to do. Thus, in 2008 I would give myself 108 things to do. Instead of doing that, I’m going to spend the next 3 weeks taking stock of my life over the past year, and the past 27 and a half years, and make myself a list of projects and goals that are both more realistic and more ambitious.

Also, I’m going to enlist your help in these endeavours, and where applicable, I will be asking for help and posting before pictures and, much later, after pictures. Several of the projects that come readily to mind involve projects around our house, which, sadly, have gone unstarted since we moved in. You know, in OCTOBER 2005. I always told myself that I wasn’t working on the house because I was in grad school, and I didn’t have time, or money, or blah blah blah. Unfortunately, that’s not the case anymore, and I find that I am out of excuses.

To the end of keeping myself accountable to the internet, and to documenting these processes, I am creating a new category, titled Projects, which will serve as my stash-place for all these things. Over the next few weeks – and into 2008 – I’ll post pleas for help, stories of success (I hope), and pointers for how NOT to do the things I will attempt, as I am completely certain I will screw up. The first post, about what I’m affectionately dubbing The Laundry Situation From Hell, will be forthcoming soon, but before it gets here I want comments from all of you with PROMISES – IN WRITING – that you won’t abandon us over the state of our laundry and of our bedroom in general, which, I promise, will be changing very soon. With your help.

Here’s to 2008!