By conventional measurements, this was a really crummy year. Using yard sticks, centimeters, bathroom scales, one scoop, and a big jar, it doesn’t add up to shit. Except the shit flying onto the walls in the shitstorm. This year had painful legs, asshat doctors, surgery, the mafia, pot growers, lost revenues, lost horses, lost clients, lost friends, a dead horse, crazy dogs, bloody volkswagen, a tiny liver, disappearing land, cops, a botched spay, turning old, and a broken dogwalk contact.

You know how happy I was during some of that time? So not happy. Do this with your face, squinch up your eyes tight, grimace your lips, turn your teeth black and ugly, crook your neck, bend over sideways, pull out your hair and make a low growl that seethes out your lips very slow and crazy sounding. That’s how I walked around a lot of this year.

You know who really didn’t notice? The dogs.

They still just wanted to go to the beach or go run around in the forest. So that’s what we did.

My husband noticed. He’s a champ. He was all, let’s just settle down here.

I started digging through my photos just now. Life looks pretty good when I scroll through them, click click click, over and over. I pulled up exactly 665 in one folder labeld 2015. Each one carefully edited, spruced up in photoshop, lighting corrected and little bits sharpened up. Stupid phone pics. That’s almost 2 per day of life looking good. That is a shit load of smiles on dogs and people and even on some ponies. I couldn’t cram 665 good ones into one rectangle. That isn’t counting the shitty photos, just the really smiley ones.

So smiley you get the sugar shakes, hand all twitching, just from looking at only half of them.

I drew a lot of pictures this year. I wrote some stories. I played with my dogs. I got up early. I learned how to walk better. I played it cool. I tried to appreciate things like they suggest on groovy buddhism websites that have all art directed images of tiny houses with blackboard walls and reclaimed wood.

Life is different now, it’s a different place than it was before. 2016 is not going to blow. There will be no freaking out.

There will be new friends. Lovely horses. Nice dogs. New land. New business model. Fewer doctors. Appreciation for not being dead. If I was a pioneer lady, driving an ox across the plains in the dead of winter wearing a sack with frostbitten feet, I’d totally be dead at my age. I have shoes, goddamnit, quite a few pairs including ugly gore tex ones with nubby soles that I got on sale from Amazon. Prime, baby. We have Prime. And I’m alive and my hair looks pretty rad today and I can wear a tunic.

Tomorrow I’ll get up and we’ll go run around in the forest, or maybe the beach. The dogs will be all, this is fantastic. FANFUCKINGTASTIC. Like they do every day. And I’ll work on some drawings then go do a little agility, just some come to hand and some dogwalks, maybe a few a-frames. Not too many. And it will all be cool and it will all be happy and I’ll be all, hey 2016. Thanks for coming. Nice to meetcha. Let’s get going.

Michael Stipe had fluffy hair in 1983. Me too. Ring it out, boys.