...and so this is Christmas.

There's an extremely small part of me that feels bad about what I like getting for Christmas. When you scour your memory banks and think back to what sort of stuff your Dad would get for Christmas when you were a kid, it's probably a lot different than the sort of things I end up with.

I know a lot of people who regularly get exciting gifts like power tools, soap and underwear. Two things to say about this. All three of these gifts are in essence, shit. Nobody really wants these things. They are the sort of things you get when when you don't have a personality strong enough to suggest you might preferably like something else - unless perhaps you used to be a tramp who found a lottery ticket and now needs to make some home improvements.

Thus, I was most pleased that my family decided I might like a Kiss t-shirt as a gift. I don't normally get excited about much at all, but this warmed my heart. It's good to know that people know me well enough to think I would be pleased with just this - but there's also that other small part of me that thinks maybe I should grow up. Quite a few times over the last year I've actually needed a drill, but not once have I ever actually needed a Kiss t-shirt for anything. If anybody ever bought me a drill though, I may go on a killing spree with it - in my Kiss t-shirt.

Anyway, as usual, Christmas was preceded by insane amounts of stress over getting it right and turned out to be just fine. Now that it's pretty much over, I've gone into hyper-work mode during these Dead Days (the official name for the time between Christmas and New Year) and find myself either throwing projects with no mileage away, starting new ones or mashing two together. Most exciting is the prospect of co-writing Turn The Lamp Down Low. I've never co-written anything before. Too Hot For Dogs is different... I do my thing and Charlie makes it look good. Co-writing sounds like 'sharing' to me - this will be a real test as I'm not sure either of us are good at sharing, but then, I don't know for sure because I've never actually shared anything before. More on that later.

I'm also very aware that I said I would blog here every single day of my life from January 1st onwards. This means I might have to do something interesting every single day of my life to justify it. Daunting though that may sound, it has to be better than letting days roll by and in a year's time writing up a blog on how I got a drill for Christmas 2009.

In fact, tomorrow or maybe later today, I'm going to post a list of achievements from 2008 and a concrete list of goals for 2009. That way, the ZLPD (yeah, you know who you are) will hopefully keep an eye on me and pour scorn and sarcasm where necessary in attempts to fire my ass into action. I suspect one list will be fairly short and the other fairly long.

And I shall be wearing a Kiss t-shirt while I do it.