Happy New Year!

The problem with wracking your brains to come up with the ideal blog post to open the new year with is that you think of a number of possibilities, discard each one as too insignificant, vow to not resort to an exegesis on New Year's resolutions, and then wish you had thought to compile your lists of favourite things from 2007 (books, music, movies, blog posts, outings, etc) before the year was out!

As things get desperate, you wonder if you should resist the temptation to compile lists of things you've got planned for the week/summer/2008/the rest of your life – then give the whole thing up as too hard/obviously cheating and not blog for a whole week!

So, the lesson is there is no ideal blog post to open the year. There is only the days coming one after the other as the year moves on. And in realising that blogging is, if anything, about cheating, here are some lists:

What I'm enjoying about this summer

• cooling off at Williamstown beach last Friday evening after a beastly hot day, especially getting there early enough to get good parking and leaving as the hoons started to mass in the car park
• sweet, ripe peaches – white or yellow
• cherries in season – not air-flown from North America
• lovely, crisp blue skies
• leftover fruitcake from Christmas
• the cool change blowing through the unit, rather than past the front or back doors
• the cricket – India actually gave Australia a fight at the SCG, leading to some pretty exciting viewing, especially…
• watching Andrew Symonds play
  
• fresh basil
• ripe tomatoes
• the fact that Victoria's bushfire season has had a slow, and relatively uneventful, start this year (touch wood)
• drinking more white wine that red
• blueberries
• it being extremely quiet at work since I started back last Wednesday
  

What I'm hanging out for this summer

• a chorus of cicadas – I haven't quite figured out the necessary change in temperature, humidity or pressure that inspires them to sing, but I'm hoping a change in geography later this month (see below) will allow me to hear them
• the beach – we're going to Phillip Island for a week later this month, and I can barely wait
• a bbq
• local Victorian tomatoes
• gelati from my favourite gelati shop in Lygon St, Carlton
• getting new tyres on my bike and starting riding again
  

What I've been enjoying reading recently

• As mentioned earlier, Phillip Pullman's His Dark Material's trilogy, the first of which The Golden Compass is on based
• The Best Australian Essays 2007 – the standout is Gillian Mears's 'Alive in Ant and Bee'
• Pavlov's posts on proofreading, Christmas and memes

What I'm listening to over and over

• Radiohead's In Rainbows – which I had downloaded as soon as it was available, and pretty much haven't stopped listening to
• Red Hot Chili Peppers' Stadium Aracadium
• an eclectic mix Michael Franti, Lenny Kravitz, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Rickie Lee Jones, and a bunch of other laid-back grooves, including a couple of free downloads I found last year but, to my frustration, can't remember where
• the guitar-driven, joyful rhythms of music from Mali

What I'm enjoying looking at
my favourite creative commons photos from flickr (and my own), many I've published here over the past year and a half. I've imported them into my iphoto library and onto my ipod to view on the tram. They are, in particular: this, this, this, this and this.

What is inspiring me

• Ampersand Duck's lists – I'm going to do more lists. I may even share a few here
• Unique_Stephen's fantastic photo of his son – I'm going to take a serious crack at photography this year
• Kirsty's first sentence from her first post of each month of 2007 – I'm going to work on my opening sentences. It will also be instructive to go back through my posts and see how many begin with apologies for not blogging in a while. I will change that in 2008!
• joyfully, more than I can think of to write a long list!
  

And though it seems rather late, I do wish you a Happy New Year!