Those who know me best know today is my favorite holiday. Something about New Year’s Day just does it for me. I block off more than a little time to reflect on the year that was (including but not limited to mistakes I may’ve made…miscalculations in need of re-calculating…areas in need of improvement.) And I endure this (often painful) retrospective only because I quickly follow it up with the far more enjoyable exercise of laying out whatever hopes/wishes/dreams I intend for the year ahead. And then, with blank canvas before me (usually in the form of a new journal awaiting a newly inked up fountain pen) do I do my most serious soul searching of the year. This process, more than any other I can think of, renews me, body, spirit and soul. But while I have loved each and every January 1st of my adult life, this particular New Year’s Day finds me at a crossroads… For starters, LIFE feels different right now. “Off” even. Yeah, I know. I’m older. Clearly perspectives change with age. But at my core, things feel different: “Odd” may be a better word (says the girl who used to make her living discussing and debating worldly things…political things, who now finds herself dang happy she’s living on a goat farm surrounded by a pride of big white Pyrenees dogs, a significant number of barn cats and…(don’t even get me started on the chicken count… Trust by now you get the picture. Picking up what I’m putting down?) Having forsaken my #1 “drug of choice” (that being daily writing/journaling and/or blogging~ all tried and true healthy means of processing this thing called life) it hit me a few days back that 10 years ago today, I retreated from my once familiar ‘city life and career’ to take on country living, full time… An experiment of an experience I took on, thinking I’d be living some Tennessee version of Walden’s Pond ~ (My sincerest apologies Mr. Thoreau. I knew not of what I wrote. It was a naïve endeavor, but my intentions were pure.) But somewhere between reflecting (both on the year that was, as well as the decade that has transpired since last I blogged), and laying out resolutions for this, my blank canvas of a year ahead, I decided the best way to get back to healthy and helpful habits would be to resume this blog (10 years later) to show a) how naïve I was 10 years ago per the assumptions I made and the life I was living then and b) jump start the discipline that (if nothing else) DID serve a useful and helpful purpose (whether anyone “out there” chooses to read it or not). In short, make no mistake. This is a purely selfish exercise. I mention it here in public forum only because I know myself well enough to know if I commit to someone outside of myself to do a task/(i.e. write awhile) I’ll stick to it, as I’m far more apt to stick to a promise made to you, (even if I don’t know you) than anything I ever promise or say to myself, in my head, to my dogs…whomever. So… With that said…