Greetings to my hordes of faithful readers. I am here to reassure you that Mandounette has not abandoned you. In fact, Mandounette has a brain full of ideas for the blog this year including a couple of sublogs dedicated to dreams and to my urban exploration project. I feel that the tsunami dream that I had last month and the lower Manhattan building imploding dream I had in May 2001 are creepy enough to merit a written record of the weirdest levels of my sub and superconscious, not to mention that I really think that my dreams make good stories. I hope to also have extensive links to other quality dream blogs and some writing about how cultures not corrupted by Jung and/or mystical cynicism approach the phenomenon of dreams.

An article in The New Yorker, my new pedometer, and my OCD attraction to projects requiring patience, stamina, and highly controlled randomness have all contributed to my Parisian exploration idea. I plan to walk every street in Paris over the next several years. The guy in The New Yorker did Manhattan in about 4 years. Paris will most definitely be more challenging as there are a lot of little roads, impasses, and alleyways that radiate from roundabouts with very little organization. But it should be fun anyway. I am sure someone else has already done this, but I figure my observations will be different. The plan is to discover at least one little section of the city each week. This will hopefully start this week, although I have to fix the shutter on my camera and calibrate my pedometer. Each post will have number of steps taken, distance covered, a map highlighting the streets I finished and my observations including historical markers, cool places, and whatever I find worthy. I won't even go into the anal retentive way I have selected which area I am going to each week.

Oh, and did I mention that I will be creating these, as well as this very post that you are reading, from my very own iBook G4? The other computer was having a few too many senior moments, so Ste saved the day with this little present, which makes me very, very happy. Other presents from this year's orgy of consumerism include a slew of DVDs (In Living Color, Seinfeld, The OC, Lost in Translation, Ani DiFranco live, Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection, etc.), some fun board games, and a loofah. I just wanted to mention the loofah to pay hommage to the 3, count them 3, screenings of Bad Santa that I saw over the past 3 weeks. I just remember the midget's "prune-faced mail-order bride" asking, "Did you get the loofah?"

From the team here at Mandounette and honorary guest personality, Thurman Merman, happy new year!