Hello, 2012...

So here we are in 2012, a year people have been anticipating.

Let's get this out of the way, right now.  I don't think the world is going to end this year.  I'm planning to party on the winter solstice like I do every year because I'm a good heathen.  Okay it's mostly because I love eggnog, but I'm still planning my party.  I'm not concerned about Mayan calenders; look at them, they're circles, they don't end.  I'm not concerned about planetary alignments that are going to melt the ice caps overnight and flood the coasts (mostly because neither Countdown contributor and astronomer Derrick Pitts nor Jim Cantore have mentioned this danger).  Also I'm pretty sure The Weather Channel would have non-stop specials on our impending doom if it were even the slightest threat - "It WILL Happen Tomorrow!!1!"

That's not to say there isn't a lot going on this year.  There's the presidential election in November and the torturous 10 months leading up to it.  Who doesn't love being bombarded by political commercials that seem like rejected SNL spoof ads?  I especially love them now that corporations can pour boatloads of money into campaigns.  By November we'll all be begging to see strange guys happily singing about erectile dysfunction meds and that miserable gecko.  Senator Bernie Sanders is seriously charging toward overturning the Citizen's United ruling that gives us those terrible political ads (as well as outright buying our democracy). Bernie is one of the few truly good people in all of Congress, and I'll be supporting him in his effort any way I can.  

There's the Summer Olympics, too (no Quidditch, so I don't know how much I'll watch).  My big fear with the Olympics is that the park pool where I go will be even fuller than usual.  I finally found an outdoor pool to swim in last summer after five years of basically no swimming.  I am not going back to being pool-less.  It's 19 degrees Fahrenheit outside and I'm already dreaming of swimming this summer.  Some people might not find five years swim-less appalling, but I grew up swimming in huge outdoor, in-ground, semi-private community pool that covered an acre.  Yes - it was an acre of pool, with a water slide, and diving boards and it was set up like a lake so that most of the edges started at less than a foot and it got deeper toward the middle.  If I sound nostalgic it's because going to that pool almost every day every summer, meeting up with friends, swimming for hours on end was, for me, one of the best parts of growing up.

As far as my personal life, 2012 is looking huge but I can blog about pretty much none of that right now - partly because I don't want to jinx it and partly because so much is yet to be set in stone.  So, shhh... I'll talk about that another time.