Beautiful Housekeeping

Happy 2008!!!!!!!

Some of you have formulated New Year's Resolutions; if there is one day in which we should probably all do our best to keep them, it's today. I mean, if you set a goal and don't meet it on the very first day of the year ... well ... the optimist might say you are only bound to be more successful in the future, even if through sheer accident.

I won't engage in the ponderous task of listing the particulars of my own resolutions and goals for 2008 (though, over the next few weeks, some of the details will probably emerge here, slipping out like scarabs from under a desert rock, baked in the sun of my current declaration), but the spirit of the task has already been perfectly captured by Thoreau.

In Walden, he writes:

"Before we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the walls must be stripped, and our lives must be stripped, and beautiful housekeeping and beautiful living be laid for a foundation."

I propose to inaugurate 2008 as my Year of Beautiful Housekeeping; and more joyous an undertaking I cannot at present fathom!

To all of you, I wish not only the very best that life has to offer during this hatchling year, but, in the taking of it, the very best that you have to offer life.