A Happy New Year?

If your idea of a fun New Year’s Eve involves a half naked, pajama-clad pig dancing with a champagne bottle, then I’m not coming to your party. It sounds more like the makings of a Jan Švankmajer film to me.

Sometimes I like to wonder things like, “What led the sender of this postcard to choose this particular design?” Was it the only New Year’s postcard to choose from, or was there a rack full of different designs, and this one was “just right”? Perhaps the purchaser of this postcard found the maniacal pig somehow cute.

Usually, the end of the year is a good time to look back at the past twelve months and reflect, with special attention to everything you did wrong or badly, and plan to be a better person in 5…4…3…2…1.

Sometimes, it is useful to focus on the positive. With that in mind, here’s a completely useless thing that I’ve learned this year, in fact, in the past week: an infrared paint stripper also makes a tasty grilled cheese sandwich.

I am still working on stripping the paint off my door molding, and it won’t be quite finished by the end of 2010. In the midst of all my hard work scraping off paint, I took a dinner break and tested out the grilled cheese making potential of this handy tool.

Keep in mind that I could have used a heat gun, but I think that it would toast the bread too quickly and not allow the cheese to melt. This is a test I will have to save until 2011, though.