As the sunrise pushes across the globe, bringing on the first day of the new year, I always feel an extra focus and energy. This has been a helluva year. Just with the public stuff I feel like I've been cranked through the emotional wringer. I could list some of the causes, but Keith Olbermann summed up the year with video clips, and a touch of whimsy that was just what the doctor ordered.

They had a video clip from Meet the Press that had all of John Kerry's conditionals and qualifiers and numbers all spliced together, and it left me in stitches. (Where does that expression come from? How do laughing and stitches connect?) Those 20 seconds or so of "First of all--Secondly--First--Second--There are two things, Tim--" seemed to capture in amber what missed in his candidacy. And I'm sorry, I just I had to laugh, I'm so tired of crying.

It's New Years Day.

I'm something of a contrarian on New Year's. I did not partake in the nighttime revelry. Too often the lonely girl at the countdown, the drunken bashes hold no appeal for me. It's too much like raging and raving just to forget all the yesterdays. Too many stupid drunks in 3400 pounds of metal hurtling down the roads.

No, for me New Year's is about baking hot cinnamon roles, sipping rich coffee and slurping mimosas while watching the Rose Parade, snuggling if there's someone with whom to snuggle, looking forward to a year not yet written, full of promise and what adventure we'll have from it.

I pray for those struggling to survive in the aftermath of the Asia quake, or just trying to get by in a world full of hardships, mostly of our own making. Words do not suffice. The disappointments and hardships we take on as they come, as best we can, as it's all we can do.

But the dreams, they arise from within us, if we'll let them. New Year's Day is a day for those dreams. Let them fly. With our thoughts we make the world.

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