I

My Life

My year started with watching part of Poltergeist II with my heart broken daughter (all that is fixed now). There is a point when you just can’t hear the name “Carole Anne,” called in a quavery voice one more time so I went to bed before the shocking finale.

We were living in an ancient, broke-down, drafty, mouse infested farm house on the top of a tremendously steep hill which made bicycling quite a challenge. It was quiet and surrounded by trees, and I was able to walk  to work in about an hour through nice neighborhoods and forest and along a lake shore. So it wasn’t all bad.

Mary was knee deep in nursing school, while my new job at the coop school was tenuous and heading into its ultimate demise. I had to cash out my retirement account so that we could make it through to the summer when Mary would hopefully have a job.

I was watching Kurosawa movies on the weekends.

Our washer and dryer were out of commission so we had to do laundry at the laundromat (this is not fixed yet).

Overall it was a month of intense creativity. I was working on many stories and poems and writing almost everywhere I went (especially on the bus). I started many of the projects that I  put up on my blog later in the year (Aranansi and the Personal Tour of the Anatomy).

II

In the U.S.

J. D. Salinger and Howard Zinn died, and the specter of greed haunted the land.

III

The World

A massive earthquake devastated Haiti.

All in all a pretty bleak start to a challenging year for most of the world, maybe not so much for the very rich.