Happy New Year to you, too. If noth­ing else, I fig­ure, it’ll be way dif­fer­ent from the last one. I’m hop­ing it will be inter­est­ing, and not in the Chinese-curse sense of the word.

Sorry for my inter­mit­tence these past few days. If it didn’t feel right, it felt nec­es­sary — once again (deeeeep sigh), my broad­band is out, and this time I have no idea what’s wrong or how to fix it. It should work, but alas, it doesn’t. At this point, I’m ready to take all the hard­ware out into the street to let a few cars run over it, because at least then I’d know why it doesn’t work.

But enough geek­ery. How was your Christ­mas week? Mine was sub­lime, per­haps because, I real­ized at mid­week, this was the first Christ­mas week I’ve had off in…my adult life? Yeah, that sounds about right. One thing about the news­pa­per busi­ness is, the beast must always be fed, and for years, I was one of the feed­ers. Why waste a week of vaca­tion in win­ter, when you can bar­gain with a fam­ily type for a week at a bet­ter time? You get a week of desk-cleaning and wait­ing for break­ing news (which rarely hap­pens), while the paper fills up with year-in-review fin­ished in mid-December.

Not this year. This year, Alan headed out the day after Christ­mas to start his new job with a lonely bachelor-guy fur­nished apart­ment as home base. I hoped he’d say, “When I get a stake, I’ll send for you and the child,” but no. We’ll be there in a month; until then, I’m solo­ing and we’re hav­ing a week­end mar­riage. When he came home, I said, “How’s the new place?”

“The peo­ple down­stairs f*ck every night from 11:15 to 11:45,” he said. “Loudly. She’s a crier; he hoots like a baboon.”

I’d for­got­ten what apart­ment life was like.

OK, then.

In what promises to be an ener­vat­ing series of lec­tures about how much more evolved they are, morally, than you and me, an IWF-er tells us why we feel let down after Christ­mas. Unfor­tu­nately, she’s right — Christ­mas has been made unbear­able in recent years, thanks to our old pal cap­i­tal­ism. I think they had it right in the Mid­dle Ages, when the sea­son began on Christ­mas Day and con­tin­ued at least until Epiphany. I still remem­ber vis­it­ing Lon­don a few years ago and see­ing the Christ­mas dec­o­ra­tions finally going up in Pic­cadilly Cir­cus the day we left — Decem­ber 12.

So I plan to have myself a merry lit­tle Christ­mas, even though we took the tree down today. I had to do it when I had the help.

Back to the man­gle tomorrow.