Happy new year, folks!

 Hard to believe, but here is 2023. May it be a better year for good people than was 2022.

School begins two weeks from Tuesday. A fair bit of time during the break has been consumed by unpleasant but necessary obligations. I did get to spend some nice time with friends and family, and that made the holidays more cherished for me. 

This morning I heard from a good friend in Belgium. I asked how all their folks were doing, mentioning I'd heard concerns for a cold winter and scarcity of or phenomenal expense of heating fuel. He said that it's been mild lately. I hope that's not just the calm before the storm. Brutal cold is terrible, I know, but it seems especially hard on the old and the very young. Also, the riots in Paris are troubling, perhaps mostly because they are being called "protests" when they are clearly, you know, riots. Footage of motorists being pulled from their cars and those cars set ablaze is to be found on some outlets online, but not the mainstream ones in the USA, as far as I know. We can't have people distracted from the narrative currently being advanced related to social engineering and all that sort of stuff. The "interesting times" of the Chinese proverb seem at hand, sadly.

Anyway, I spent today cleaning and cleaning and organizing. I have much to do in these two weeks, including a quick trip to Virginia for a writer's convention. I need to hit all the marks every day to make sure I don't drop any of the balls I'm juggling. Mostly, I'm blessed and am making progress, but sometimes, it seems slow, plodding. Not complaining, except for the bullet-train effect of the passage of time, particularly when one has a break from routine. 

All in all, though, as I said in the beginning, I am hoping for the best for all of us. I'm not foolish enough to expect the best, but I feel one should not abandon hope. 

In the words of Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

“If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us. But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us.”

I'm not driving blind into dark waters, exactly, but I am trying to learn from mistakes. I don't have control over the rest of the world, and how life will unfold for us as a civilization. I keep hoping that it will correct itself, that what appears mass psychosis in which we celebrate mental illness and vilify people who try to live by a strict and respectful code in life becomes something we're looking at in the waves behind us, disappearing in the rear-view mirror. But in the end, my own behavior is all I can control, and is the only thing for which I am accountable. I pray for self-governance, and to be a help and support to those I love. If I succeed on that score, I'll count myself doubly blessed for having been useful to those I most hold dear. I can't ask for greater than that.