Lucubrating Planned for the New Year

Okay, I am ready now.            


I am ready to say goodbye to 2011 and to greet the new year. Frankly, it looks a lot like the old one. But there is always hope that I can actually make the changes I want to see happen in my life, to find energy and passion and smarts and financial gain with a thin profile to boot. Then again, I might flounder like some trout thrown up on a grassy bank under a hot sun! Who knows?

My first thrill of the year is this great new word, lucubrate. It means to work and write laboriously, esp. at night. I think that is a number one plan for me. I want to see words race across the page, see characters sit up and challenge me to make them sparkle, to feel the relief of finishing a well-told and crafted story. I have given up on it being a paying gig; I just want the satisfaction of a job well done.

Vocabulary has always been fun for me, like a game. I was always thrilled and tested to do the Reader Digest vocabulary quiz. I read new words better than I could use them. I never said them quite right, always hearing them in my head a certain way that wasn’t always correct. Friends and co-workers have teased me when I used new words. One son when he was a child accused me of trying to speak in a foreign language just because I used words he didn’t know. I love words.

Today the wind blows rather fiercely, but the temps are in the mid 60’s and that is on the threshold of January! It isn’t often you can stand on the borders of December and January to photograph any flowers on the deck, but today I could not help snapping the winter pansies. They are just as vibrant as a spring flower. The sky was also a message from Heaven I think. It was perfectly cloudless and blazing in a shade of blue topaz. Even the moon didn’t want to miss this day!

Happy with today’s serendipity, I made sandwiches and grabbed granola bars. We went to the city lake, despite the brisk wind,  to soak up sun with a quick picnic. There the ducks and geese floated on water warmed by sun rays and let the wind bluster them into a flotilla of fowl. Man and bird alike could not ignore the good luck of the fair day!

So, starting off 2012 right, I intend to lucubrate tonight with books and paper and pen and keyboard. I want some poetry, some fiction, some blogging, some letters, some journaling, some…..

How about you, do you like new words?