New Year, New Notebook

Wasn’t it great how this year — and last year, I should say — Christmas Day and New Year’s Day both fell on Tuesdays? It made for a particularly quiet holiday season, at least at the office. And today, first day back at work, it’s a bit of a treat to remember that it’s just a three-day workweek — heck tomorrow’s Thursday, already.

All of that time off, both from work and, yes, from this blog, was exactly what I craved. I just needed the month of December, between my traveling and the holidays, to take it easy and spend time with Mister President. This morning when I got to the office, I felt more rested and recuperated than I thought I would, though there’s about a million things I’m already behind on for 2008.

Still, I’m feeling pretty positive about this year. Someone asked me in the elevator today if I thought the new year would be a good one, and somewhat unexpectedly, I said, “It’s going to be great!” I don’t know why I said that exactly, but it just sort of jumped out. And then I thought to myself, wow, it’s kind of frightening how much of an optimist I’ve become.

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Paris Is Burning (for Now)

Sorry, sorry; I’m having a hard time getting back into the swing of things after my trip to Paris. Between that and the holiday rush, there doesn’t leave much time for my duties here on this blog.

Actually, I hadn’t anticipated falling off the blogging wagon so easily. I fully expected to be blogging regularly from Paris, but after that initial entry, all of my best intentions flitted away. I was doing a lot of walking around town, taking photographs, spending time with my dad, seeing friends and fighting jet lag; somehow the idea of being productive on my laptop at the end of each day lost out to just resting and relaxing.

I had a great time in Paris, as I always do. In fact, its vivid beauty is so universally acknowledged and accurate that there’s almost nothing original I can write in further praise of it. If you’ve never visited, suffice it to say that it lives up to its reputation in every way — and with each repeat visit, it reveals something new and characteristically stunning.

It’s certainly not perfect, though. For various reasons, I was ready to come home by the end of the week — one of the primary ones being that I got fed up with the Parisian predilection for smoking like it’s going out of style.

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