Happy New Year

It's now technically the 2nd, but what the hell. I plan to write in this thing more often than I now do. (I may also comment on other people's LJs more often than I now do! SHOCKING!) Whether I produce anything worth reading remains, as ever, up in the air.

I actually don't really have any New Year's resolutions this year, which is kind of a first for me; I usually at least have "remain unsexy nonsmoker" and "read x number of books" going for me, and they're generally pretty serviceable. Amazing things accomplished today include such highlights as walking for a mile, cleaning out the front seat of my car (yeah, trying to break things down into small and unthreatening chunks, also it's below freezing out and I don't want to spend any more time outside than I have to), and learning to cast on. (duokinneas: The octopus sweater sees you. It is coming for you in the night.) I have all the hand-eye coordination of one of those eyeless fish that lives in caves (several of which are native to my fine home state) and the fine motor skills of an arthritic sloth (with apologies to James Lileks), so I felt some trepidation. I think I may have to supplement my how-to book with YouTube. Ultimately, I did manage to get a few stitches on the needle, because I tend to view these things as EPIC BATTLES OF WILL OMG wherein a ball of purple yarn is my evil archnemesis and I must prove that I am not dumber than it is, but I think I need more practice. I envy people with any kind of manual dexterity.

...Long paragraph is long.

Oh, and I have a 43 Things account, on the off chance anybody else has one and wants to follow my gorfy progress.

Also: I made a sweet potato pudding cake for the lolmom. Unfortunately, I failed at planning properly and apparently also ignored the bit where it has to sit in the fridge for like 3 hours, so we wound up not having it as the coda to our delicious New Year's meal of kielbasa and sauerkraut. (Pork and cooked cabbage on New Year's Day is traditional in my family.) However, it does smell good and may convince me to like sweet potatoes, at least when mixed with rum and sugar. I am not ordinarily a fan. (Regular potatoes are damn good eating. Hello, I am a Slav. I am also of Irish descent.)

I'm reading The Old-Time Maori by Makereti (Maggie Papakura), which is awesome; as Paul Diamond points out, at the time it was written (late '20s/early '30s), anthropology was a fairly new discipline and anthropology about one's own in-group was even more uncommon. I'm sure there's something I want to say about Makereti's being both female and Maori and negotiating culture and so on, but it just really escapes me and I'm not feeling very articulate at the moment. All I know is, it brings me big joy in brainmeats and it makes me excited and I want to write something. (Hello, n0v3l.)

So. Happy New Year. :D

[EDIT: I just noticed that I haven't used my Maori tag in almost a year. This calls for some serious remediation.]