Bloggle

If you’d ask me, I’d tell you that I’m an optimist. So why is it, then, that for so many years my New Year’s resolution has been, “I resolve not to make a stupid resolution, ’cause the last thing I need is another commitment I can’t or won’t keep.” In retrospect, I believe that’s what folks might call half glass full thinking. Better to try — and maybe fail — than not to try at all. And so…

I resolve:

• To quit smoking. And to keep quitting, until it sticks.
• To get serious about exercise. I actually got a jump-start on this one (is that cheating?) by starting a regular program on my shiny new rower. I’m four weeks in, and I’ve made a major discovery… there are muscles in my ass! Who knew?
• To find the center on that whole work / life balance thing. ‘Cause honestly, I don’t know that I need to prove anything to anybody anymore.
• To get more green. Okay, so I’ve started this one, too… but buying a few compact fluorescent light bulbs only goes so far.
• To write a scene every day. Which is a lot less scary than resolving to write a novel. And more practical. And while I’m at it, I’d better resolve to not start every day’s writing by endlessly editing and revising what I wrote the day before.
• To be an advocate for things I believe in. I was struck recently by a passage written by Kim Stanley Robinson in Red Mars:
  

  “They were so ignorant! Young men and women, educated very carefully to be apolitical, to be technicians who thought they disliked politics, making them putty in the hands of their rulers, like always.”

  It blew me away; it was so true, and struck so close to home. I’m not so young as I used to be… maybe I can tweak that ignorance factor, too.

How ’bout you?

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Christmas?! Wasn’t it Thanksgiving just a few days ago?

Sigh.

Rather than let another year slip by without taking the opportunity, let me wish you and yours the very best for this joyful and sacred season — whichever season you may happen to call sacred — and more still in the coming year.

Merry Christmas, one and all.

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While I’m a fan of most things seasonal, I’m not a fan of all seasonal beers. Spring offers too-sweet Maibocks. Summer brings out pale and pallid pilseners and Hefeweizen and their ilk. Autumn though… well that’s another story.

Give me the hale and hearty ales of autumn. Wait! Make it a pumpkin ale. Cambridge Brewing Company’s Great Pumpkin Ale is a fine one, but me, I’m a fan of this year’s offering from Smuttynose.

Want to make your own?

Receipt for Pompion Ale

Let the Pompion be beaten in a Trough and pressed as Apples. The expressed Juice is to be boiled in a Copper a considerable Time and carefully skimmed that there may be no Remains of the fibrous Part of the Pulp.

After that Intention is answered let the Liquor be hopped, culled, fermented & casked as Malt Beer.

– Papers of the American Philosophical Society, February, 1771

Better still, make it an ale brewed in a pumpkin! More, at MeFi.

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It’s remarkable the ways the Internet has transformed us. We’ve been quietly beguiled by technology that doesn’t look or feel like, well… like technology. We’re connected — inexorably, insidiously connected — in ways that just a few years ago we might not have imagined, and yet today we take wholly for granted.

For your consideration, Roger Mummert’s slice of modern life via the NYTimes travel section — At a Family Gathering, an Internet Cafe Breaks Out.

“Do you mind,” one in-law asked, as I rounded up bedding and fretted over having enough milk in the fridge to fill 12 cereal bowls in the morning, “if I just pop onto the computer and check my e-mail?”

“Oh, yeah,” remarked another. “Maybe I could just track my son’s flight from D.C.”

“Ooh, perhaps you could print something out for me …”

That was my first inkling of how the vastly expanded electronic and informational needs of houseguests would flavor our time together.

Welcome, to this modern life.

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