Out With The Old. Seriously, Get It The Heck Out Of Here!

So, here we are. The end of the year, again. This time last year, I was reflecting back over the events of 2010 and complaining that, while at least it was free of horrible tragedy, it was chock-full of stressful annoyances, and my plea for 2011 was, "Less of that, please."

Fate, of course, laughs at such entreaties and instead saw fit to give me more of that.

I started 2011 with a spare kitten living in my house, being very cute, but costing me a great deal in vet bills and worry. I ended the year with his sister doing exactly the same things. We started the year with a winter that brought freakish snowstorms and record-breaking temperatures so low that the state ran out out of desperately needed natural gas, followed by a hundred-year drought of a summer, then more freakish snowstorms to round out the year. I spent too much of 2011 in doctors' offices, ending up with orthotics for my feet, pills for my thyroid, and the despondent sense that it really is all downhill from forty. There was, of course, the great pipe leak and all its consequences, which have not been entirely dealt with yet. Work became six different kinds of annoying, as we embarked on the process of switching over to new hardware and still-in-development software. My sister got divorced, my mother became an employment yo-yo, and my father's pancreas tried repeatedly to kill him.

On the other hand, it's hard to knock a trip to Hawaii. Vacationing is its own kind of stressful, of course, but the opportunity to visit a beautiful place and have some exciting new experiences did help to make the whole year a little bit brighter. And, suspicious medical test results to the contrary, I turned out not to have either kidney disease or breast cancer, so that's something to be happy about.

Still. Do you think it will be tempting fate if I once again ask, plaintively, for less of that, please?