2019

I have to admit, the nineteen is throwing me off a bit.

Even though, at work, we've been in the 2019 Fiscal Year for six months already, that largely exists in one partition of my life.  There's something a bit different about everyone else using it all of a sudden.

It wasn't helped, of course, by the branding of Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve '19.  Because even though it's been nearly two decades since the last time those two digits appeared together in the year, there are still enough personal milestones, relevant family dates, and the like in my memory that my natural reaction to "nineteen" in such a context is to wonder — "nineteen-what?"

I suppose one could answer "nineteen-wonderful", if one is a fan of Rudolph's Shiny New Year.  Interestingly, though the family has more-or-less settled into a holiday routine in terms of our television consumption, we somehow missed that particular special this year.

Nevertheless, alas, the concept of dealing with "what-nineteen" instead is messing with me, numerically, a bit more than other years have.  And it means that 2020, which has often been a nebulous, intangible, futuristic year, is just around the corner.  Politicians are already throwing their hats into the ring for the next cycle.

I'm back in Pittsburgh now and, while working on my annual doodle, I've been assessing how I'm going to tackle the first few days of the year.  The advantage of the short work week ahead, especially having followed the long holiday, is that I basically have my priorities there pretty well planned out already — with room, of course, for adjustments as necessary.  But, with an unreliable phone battery, having left the bag containing one (or both!) of its wall chargers at my parents' house — thank goodness for power bricks! — and arriving to a bit of mildew on the sheets in my darkened bedroom, the domestic chores are also going to be pretty high on the list.

Here's hoping I find the return to work energizing enough that I can start chipping away at it with aplomb, leaving just enough time to celebrate my birthday on Friday.  "Get through the week" isn't the most exciting resolution, I suppose, but it'll do for now.

Random tangent: I think the "9" kinda looks like it's smiling, don't you?  It's half the reason I left it the way I did.