Seventy-fourth posting - wish

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, friends. Don’t worry, in this entry, I won’t wax nostalgic over the past 12 months, and I won’t share my resolutions for the coming 12. Rest assured, you’ll hear/read plenty more from me in 2007.

I recently had a great week in Florida with my sister and her family, and my parents. Mom and Dad are building a cabin-on-a-lake in Wisconsin, so that seemed to be the key topic of my vacation. Fortunately, said “cabin” will be less of the log-and-outhouse type and more the vacation-and-Cinzano-umbrella-on-the-deck type. (Although I’m all for the former, the rest of the family is not.) Unfortunately, we collectively share the same lack of decorating skills – but plenty of opinions – so who knows what it will end up looking like. I will probably lose the battle in preventing moose- and bear-bedecked furnishings from the family room, but little do the parents know that there is plenty of room downstairs for foosball, darts, a Leinenkugel-branded bar, and a projector screen TV.

While in Florida, I continued my acquisition of works of art by James Kingsland. Total collection to date: two. Kingsland was born in Connecticut in 1923, with limited national recognition, and as far as I can tell, he’s still alive. His major works include the illustration of a Maine cookbook, a set of notecards, a book from the 1950s on “easy living”, and several dozen sketches, paintings and watercolors that have yet to become famous (meaning auctioned, acquired or reproduced). I am not banking on Mr. Kingsland, upon his death, suddenly become a hot, must-have artist, but gosh, wouldn’t it be nice? The piece I bought – of pencil and oil (?) – is of the Steamship Portland (Maine), a vessel that met an unfortunate demise soon after leaving port. I’ll have to Google it again, but I think it’s still at the bottom of the sea.

I will close for now, as my plane into Dallas is starting its descent. Fortunately, the two gay men next to me seem to have found a fabulous new vacation destination for one another… and this whole section of the airplane can’t wait for us to land…and for them to move on from lisping Ibiza this, Ibiza that all over the place.

If you don’t hear from me, have a wonderful New Year – and may the Democrats do something great for this country in 2007! NATHAN (and Rock On, John Edwards!)