It feels like I tend to tally up our pluses and minuses more in January, as though I am using it to predict the year. One impending marriage, one impending baby. One new case of brain cancer. A city swept by the football madness and just adorable amounts of enthusiasm. Compared to Januaries past we are certainly on the plus side, or maybe it only feels that way because my own pluses are more than my minuses. Either way I will take it.

Last week I read a story about a plan to bring more dietary iron to a community suffering from iron deficiency. Giving the world a cast-iron skillet would be the obvious solution, but one that is prohibitively expensive. Adding a small block of iron to a cooking pot would be cheaper and easier but, when given a small block of iron, the village women found them to be rather more useful as doorstops.

But it turned out that there was a fish in town that stood for good luck. And if you turn a block of iron into good luck, people are more likely to cook with it and eat up all that luck. No matter where you go something is lucky, and of all the ways to make everyone healthier I do not think that a little bit of luck in your soup is the worst way.

I suppose we could create our own luck, but it seems like a better idea to make it for someone else, given the option. If we need a motto for January to make one for the year, it seems to me like that's the one to use.

Hello, 2014.

When you got here I was in a room filled with people that I like, waiting for fireworks from a Space Needle too fogged in for them to get out. We retreated back to the television to see if the fireworks were there, but it turned out that even from the Space Needle you couldn't really see the Space Needle fireworks. Score one for the fog. But as always fireworks are just a bonus for events with friends and champagne and kissing at midnight, and I wouldn't trade the fun for fireworks. Probably.

This morning I walked to work on sidewalks just caked with streamers and confetti, shining in the gray from empty champagne bottles with their tops snapped off. I'm sure it will all get smushed together into brown soon enough, but I appreciated how bright everything had remained through a night and a day and a night.

I'm not usually one for resolutions, but I appreciate that my horoscope for the moment says this:

I predict that you will commit no major acts of self-sabotage in 2014. Congrats! I also foresee that you will be exceptionally careful not to hurt or damage yourself. Hooray! More good news: You won't be as critical of yourself as you have sometimes been in the past. The judgmental little voice in the back of your head won't be nearly as active. Yay! Even your negative emotions will diminish in frequency and intensity. Hallelujah! Whoopee! Abracadabra!

All of which sounds just fine to me. Let's go with that, 2014. If we work together, we just might get there.

Love,
me