I landed twenty minutes early at San Francisco International Airport yesterday morning, sailed through customs, immigration, and the baggage carousel, and was outside on the curb by 9:10am, the time my flight was originally supposed to land. Thanks to some excellent timing, Sean was right there to swoop me up in the car three seconds after I exited the double doors into the chilly morning. What super good luck, right? I know! But still, I was tired, I was cold, I was hungry, and I hadn't slept in a horizontal position for over 24 hours, and all I wanted to do was go home, eat a bagel, and nap for an indecent amount of time. And then right as we were pulling out of the airport---ha! that was so easy! why was that so easy?---we discovered we had a flat tire.

So that sort of sucked. I sat back on the curb in the cold again for half an hour while Sean winched the car up, took the old tire off, and put the spare one on, all in front of the International Arrivals terminal, while people enjoyed teary reunions and got parking tickets and accidentally ran over their toes with the luggage carts around us. But thank god for that spare, really, and for fiances who can change tires at a moment's notice in their work clothes, and thank god for the iPhone too, which came in very handy when we couldn't find the jack and had to google "where the f**k is the jack in a 2004 Jeep Liberty?" (Answer: under the passenger side back seat, if you ever need to know.) (Also, we didn't really put the "f**k" in there.) (Although damn, you know we wanted to. Who puts a jack under the passenger side back seat? It was the last place we would have looked. And did look, of course.)

So today is New Year's Eve and tradition dictates that I am supposed to reflect on the previous year, although tradition doesn't really dictate that, because a cursory glance over my previous end-of-December posts for 2005, 2006, and 2007 reveals that I've never actually done that on my blog at all. When I was younger, though, I used to set aside an hour on New Year's Eve to put on some Soul Asylum (this was the 90s, so maybe it was also sometimes some Pearl Jam, who knows) and fill my diary with adolescent musings regarding the year we'd just had and the year we were about to enter into.

More recently, I haven't really had much time for that---it was a year! whatever! it's over!---but perhaps because yesterday marked the two year anniversary of us moving to San Francisco, perhaps because I am exhausted and jetlagged and introspective, or perhaps because we plan to spend tonight on the couch with Guitar Hero and a bottle of champagne and therefore I'm not running around doing crazy things like painting my toenails or oscillating between dresses, I'm rather self-indulgently drawn to the idea.

Mostly I will remember 2008 as the year I didn't stop traveling. This was pretty much my own fault, of course---Girl Has Serious Case Of Wanderlust, Becomes Addicted To The Thrill Of Booking Online!---but a lot of my travel was work-related too, and this is one of the things I loved most about 2008, that I got paid to travel, my god, if that doesn't warrant italics then I don't know what does. Trust me, I have never lost sight of how lucky I am to be doing exactly what I want to be doing, with and for people I truly love. This year, I visited Vietnam, L.A., Denver, Chicago, a tiny bit of Michigan, Charleston, Orlando, Singapore, Berlin, the Bahamas, Dallas, London, Rome, Las Vegas, Seattle, and Singapore again, and just typing all that out made me tired. Also, you should know that I totally forgot to put Rome in there the first time around, which is slightly sad as a) the trip was only two months ago, and b) it's where I got engaged.

Ah yes! I got engaged! 2008 was the year that (finally) happened and maybe I'd given you the impression, in the past, that I was pretty laissez-faire about that kind of thing, but the truth is that I sort of wasn't: I was kind of quietly ready for that somewhere around early 2007 so the fact that it happened in October 2008 meant it wasn't a moment too soon. At one point earlier this year, in fact, I wanted to grab Sean by the shoulders and shout WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU WHY HAVEN'T YOU PROPOSED TO ME YET DON'T YOU KNOW I'M A CATCH!, but luckily I kept ahold of myself and realized the boy just needed some time to figure out how to get it perfect, and man, was it perfect indeed. I might have argued that it shouldn't have taken him TWELVE AND A HALF YEARS---we met in the summer of 1996, although ours is a long and complicated history, and also in the summer of 1996 I was sixteen, so ew, whatever---but after all, all good things come to those who wait. Especially those who wait twelve and a half years, apparently. Anyway, the way our wedding planning is going, we won't be married until 2015, so perhaps taking a really long time to do everything is just one of our Special Things. Parents: expect grandchildren sometime in 2040!

I'm not very good at new year's resolutions---is anyone?---but in 2009, I think I am going to try a little harder not to be a neurotic, psychotic witch.  I am not going to sweat the small stuff, I'm going to take more deep breaths, I'm going to practice a little more patience and tolerance, and I'm going to quit making things into Such A Big Deal and just let them go if they need to be let go of. I'm going to be better about keeping in touch with my friends, better about keeping my apartment clean, better about making sure my days are productive, and better about not spending money. I also pledge very solemnly to be better about making sure I eat a whole ton of ice cream every night (from the carton, in front of The Hills) because hey, I need at least one I can keep.

Happy New Year! Much luck for 2009! What are you going to do differently this year?