OK, I feel much better about this post than the one I wrote about the books I read in 2008.  I mean, come on.  Five books in the entire year?  Well, I didn’t read my first book until May of this year, but I still outdid all of my years that I’ve been keeping track so far.  Here’s my list for 2009:

B is for Beer by Tom Robbins

Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne

Novelties and Souvenirs by John Crowley

Emma by Jane Austen

The American Claimant by Mark Twain

Giving by Bill Clinton

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by JK Rowling

Something Rotten by Jasper Fforde

The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie

Speedbumps by Teri Garr

Mr. Palomar by Italo Calvino

An Old-Fashioned Girl by Louisa May Alcott

Nature Girl by Carl Hiaasan

Crippen by John Boyne

Lost Island by James Norman Hall

Bottomfeeder by Taras Grescoe

Search the Shadows by Barbara Michaels

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Paganism by Carl McColman

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury

Sabbatical by John Barth

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham

Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro

The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

The 39 Steps by John Buchan

The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by F. Scott Fitzgerald

That’s it!  I’m currently in the middle of three books and so happy to be there!!  Happy reading in 2010, everyone!

In the immortal words of The Waitresses:

“Bah, humbug!” No, that’s too strong
‘Cause it is my favorite holiday

Yes, Virginia, I really want to just bypass Christmas this year.  I am not feeling it at all.  The house is a mess and not decorated to my liking and that makes me disgruntled.  I have been sick since before Thanksgiving and I can’t sleep.  At all.  And that makes me miserable and grumpy.  We still have Christmas shopping to do and I haven’t wrapped a thing.  Christmas cookies are not done yet (although, they have been started) and Buzz and I don’t know what we’re drinking on Christmas Eve for our Christmas tradition.  Nor can we afford to buy anything to drink on Christmas Eve.

And to top it off?  Yesterday, we almost lost two cats.  Phoebe nearly went into insulin shock (a near miss because I was sick and working from home and happened to see her have a big-time ‘sode and was able to get her to the vet where they put her on a dextrose drip for several hours and stabilized her) and I thought that Courtney had escaped into the great outdoors.  We searched for an hour and a half in the dark looking for a grey tabby.  Do you know how impossible it would be to see a grey tabby amongst fallen leaves and dead grass?  And we live on a very busy street.  I expected that the next time I saw her, she’d be dead.  But, no, she was sleeping peacefully upstairs in a place I never thought to look.

So at the end of yesterday, I announced that I’d had just about as much vacation as I could stand (from “Six Days and Seven Nights").  And I just want to be done with it.  But I don’t want to be totally down on Christmas.  It is my favorite holiday and I wait for this all the rest of the year.  It’s just a pity that this one is turning out so sucky.  So, in my sister’s words, here’s to January 2nd.

Of course, the new year means working on various weekends throughout January and, seriously, we could really use a break.