'Bred Crumbs

01:42 AM As another New Year's neared, I was going to write a meditation on its meaning this time around -- how to regard a grim year past, whether to dare hope for better, what meaning an arbitrary calendar turn has in a time that has given us a day of real change, blah blah blah. But no one probably wants to read such a thing (though that never stopped me before), and I'm all shagged out from my LotR essay. Besides, it all really still boils down to that time-honored greeting, a sincere wish for me and you:

Happy new year.

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A couple days after Christmas, I got a gift even more delightful and unexpected than anything I had already received: a surprise check for more than a hundred bucks, from the state of California. Seems Sacramento shouldn't have taken disability insurance out of the one paycheck I got in this state in 1996, so I got it back. This is the second time California has refunded me money the courts said it shouldn't have taken in the first place; the first was the very welcome return of the multi-hundred-dollar fee I was charged for daring to bring a car not made in California into the state, also in 1996. Let this be a lesson to you, California; get your greedy paws off the newcomers.

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