It’s January 1st, new month, new year and one of the omens aren’t good. Omen isn’t the right word because that implies a sign of something to come. We don’t need a sign; it’s here. It is cold and we are going to be having snow and slick conditions and more COLD. It feels like 2 degrees out there.

Now, if you want omens or call them indicators if you scoff at the former, look at the time just before midnight and just after last night – the time that horribly tacky looking ball came down on Times Square. I remember remarking it looked like something from The Price is Right. I started to open a can of Diet Cherry Coke – so wrong, it fizzes all over my pants, not because it had been shaken by a New Year’s reveler, but because it was almost frozen. When I relieved the pressure, it geysered out as COLD slush. I don’t know why I am capitalizing COLD all the time now; maybe I am just peeved.

That peevishness could be related to a Words With Friends game I started before midnight and was flattened by soon after. Oh, it was horrendous. And I have to live with it for the next 365 days – unless I die and then it won’t be that long. Someone may put it on a tombstone, though, which is a good reason for the scattering of anonymous ashes.

Now, granted, when I saw the handwriting on the wall – or the pixel tiles on the pixel board, I thought, “Oh heck, blocking is just going to delay the inevitable.” Maybe, but it turned out not blocking was like throwing myself off a cliff. It went downhill from there; I believe that pun was definitely intended.

I started out with a reference to an easy December – not too cold, easy travel. Well, that’s over. The weather prediction is not good for someone in rural Northern Indiana. Now that Shane is gone, I am tempted to put a jar of peanut butter in a basket, put on my red riding hood and camp out by the heat source at the LaGrange house – as long as the cellular connections continue working. Just my Sprint phone, my Verizon ipad and my Kindle with 3G – and my Moo blanket: