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.