I Win!!!!

So.  This is it. 

Post number 1300.  A challenge made, a challenge met.  On fire in October, shocked to near silence in November, rededicated in December.  Forty posts in 31 days needed to get me to the finish line--more than I had posted in the entire year two years ago.  

Nearly ran out of steam halfway through the month, but powered by a good old Facebook meme, here I am face to face with victory.  Way to prop up a dead social media connection with one that is only just turning the corner toward that same fate.

For this final post of the challenge, I'm going to go back to a thing I did for several years awhile back, but haven't done since 2012.  My New Years Eve entry will be a retrospective of the year in blog, through the first sentence of the first entry of each month.  (With  a bit of parenthetical commentary.)

Let's have at it:

January:  "Five days into a new year.  Already."  (Well.  Let's not get too excited about it...)

February:   "I have been thinking about all this hyper-hoopla surrounding the 2016 presidential race...particularly about those lining up behind Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump—the darlings of the far-left and the far-right."  (Oh, gawd...I can't even go there right now...)

March:  "I  googled 'negative campaigning,' with an eye toward determining exactly when this became de rigueur  in the American political process."  (Already worn down by the shit-flinging, and still eight months until the general election.)

April:  " In recent years, aided by social media, the term "introvert" has become a label...some kind of cross between a psychiatric diagnosis and a badge of honor." (A wistful post, remembering a best friend who faded out of my life.)

May:  "My  'job' –that little business to which I have clung for fourteen years, now—enhances the tone of opposition my life has always had, by choice or by chance."  (Pep-talk for heading into the market season.)

June:  My only post of that month was a meme I created.  Speaks for itself, really..

 

July:  "I have a thorny problem with the “resident” sister." (Taking a moment to whine about my crazy sibling.)

August:    "Thirteen years ago, I discovered a place where I could indulge my compulsion to spatter words on blank pages--the internet."  (This is actually the post where I decided to turn my back on the political fray...for about two minutes, anyway.)

September:  "Don't you just want to put on a pith helmet and dark glasses every time you go on the internet?  Or maybe a hazmat suit..."  (More commentary on the ever-increasing ugliness of the presidential campaign.)

October:  "Sitting on my “coffee deck” in the morning has become joyous and active again." (I love October!)

November:  "To all the great players who never played a world series game, who never even got close, and all the fans, young and old, for whom hope has sprung eternal..."  (CUBS WIN!!!  But the end of the world was indeed coming shortly...)

December:  " I wake up every morning, newly unbelieving of the results of last month's presidential election. "  (Well, isn't that stating the glaringly obvious...!)

There you go.  That's it.  Goodbye 2016. 

And goodbye "Coming to Terms"?

Nah.  I don't think so.

Not just yet, anyway. 

Apparently I still have things to say. 

Happy New Year, my invisible friends.  It's going to be a challenge.

Hey--a challenge!  I can do that!