Hello 2009!

It's the last day of 2008. To celebrate, Blake and I are watching the last episode of the latest season of Canada's Worst Driver, and hopefully going to bed early. Last night we stayed up too late and ended up sleeping in, which made us late to go to the Art Gallery, but more importantly made Blake hurry through his morning routine and miss his cup of coffee, so I had to deal with his bad mood all the way through the gallery. It was like dragging a recalcitrant donkey around.

But I digress. This here is my New Year's Resolutions post. I meant to make one of these a year ago, but I never got to it, which leads me to my first resolution:

Blog more. As you might have guessed from my frantic book blogging of the last few days, I have a lot more to say than I actually get around to saying. Whether that's a good thing or not is a matter of opinion, but there's no point in having a blog if you don't post to it. Now that the girls are a little older, and now that we have two computers (maybe three if we get the new router and the old Toshiba set up) I hope I can post at least once at week. That should allow me to, at least, keep on top of the books.

I alluded to the necessity of my next resolution above: try to sleep from 11 until 7. I know, eight hours a night for a mother of two seems a little princessy, but really the whole family is better off when I've had my beauty sleep. It also seems to me that I feel most well-rested when I wake up at 7, and I have a pretty good alert period in the late evening which I could take advantage of if I stayed up until 11. I read an article in New Scientist a few years ago which said that everyone has their own natural "time zone" (and so some people's time zone doesn't fit into the 9-5 world, which gives them a kind of societally-inflicted jet lag). I think 11 to 7 works best for me — I'm just a little too cranky when I wake up before 7. Fortunately the girls sleep that late most days.

(This might be my last year of sleeping until 7 for a long time, since next year Delphine starts Grade One and I'm not sure if we can get out the door in time waking up at 7.)

Next, I'm going to try and schedule more playdates for Delphine. She's a really social little kid and I know she would love to play with her friends more — I know I would have when I was her age. The only reason she doesn't is that I don't get around to scheduling playdates for her. So I'm going to try harder and get her out there (or someone over here) maybe once a week or so.

This one is a bit embarrassing, but here it is. I have a problem keeping my cat's water clean. I tend to fill it up and then leave it for days while it gets gnarlier and gnarlier until Thomas is obliged to drink the leftover water in the bathtub. To be sure, Thomas contributes by doing everything in his limited power to drown pieces of kibble in the water bowl, and by inexplicably flicking the water out of the bowl and mucking up the tray his water lives in. Anyway, I need to just suck it up and pick up Thomas's gross water bowl every day and replace it with a clean one. How hard is that?

I need to talk to my mother more often. Before my dad died I talked on the phone with my mother maybe every couple of weeks, which isn't often enough. I should talk to her every couple of days at least, just to touch base and chit chat. Part of the problem is that I just don't make the time to call, and part of the problem is that my mother is incapable of ten minute phone calls; every call turns into a hour-long extravaganza. However, maybe if I called every day my Mum wouldn't feel the need to keep me on the phone forever? Anyway, I make stupid excuses, like I have two little kids and I'm tired and I have other stuff to do, but of course those excuses won't hold much water when my Mum is gone too and I've missed a thousand opportunities to talk to her. That would be stupid.

This is a gimme: I'm going to give up on houseplants. I just can't do it. My house is too dark and I never remember to water them at the right time, and I just don't care that much. I have enough trouble keeping three people and a cat alive. The houseplants are toast.

I have a million books on hold at the library, but I have to catch up on my Neal Stephenson. I read Cryptonomicon but I haven't read any since then, and my geek cred is severely suffering as a result. I don't know if I'm going to plough through The Baroque Trilogy or just skip straight to the latest one. We'll see.