Happy New Year!

Things are, as always, in full swing and going 10,000 miles an hour in the Hadley household. In the middle of such mayhem I have decided to start a little project: I am going to devote a year's worth of blog posts to crafting and living affordably.

Back when I lived on about $7,000 a year, I used to do an annual tarot reading with thirteen cards: one for every month and another for the year as a whole. The cards never had anything good to say, promising me years full of conflict, poverty, frustration, and loneliness. I literally never had a good reading. Not ever. The last annual reading was done in the little concrete yard of a stone house I lived in with three other girls in the Mexican neighborhood of a tiny Arizona mountain town. The tiger lilies planted by the old woman who lived there before us were blooming, and Our Lady looked down on me from a shrine in the garage wall. There, in that moment when I received more bad news from the fates, I decided that this was a profoundly stupid practice. Fittingly, a wind came up and displaced my circle of cards like a giant cat's paw in life's Scrabble game. The pieces were jumbled and it made no sense to try and order them again. It only made sense to move on.



I made a pilgrimage to the desert and ritually disposed of all I once used to tell the future. What followed was, I should add, a spectacularly strange and difficult year: I fell in a partially frozen lake, had fifty dollars (which at the time was a small fortune) stolen from my book shelf, had my heart broken, and was forced by circumstance to move. But here's the catch: it was also a wonderful year that set my course it ways I couldn't even see at the time. I met Mr. Crafty, got a nice job at a university library as well as an internship, went on an epic road trip across the country in a VW Bus, took another road trip from L.A. to Canada, and made my first real garden.

Those who want to predict the future often do so because they are uncomfortable with the state of not knowing. The trouble is that any prediction, if it is to be believed, will offer both the good and the bad to come. Only the very sturdy can encounter negative predictions and not be consumed with an even greater worry and anxiety. A segment on the news last night said that trips to psychics are on the rise. In these uncertain times it is easy to understand why. Adventure on, we all must.

My 2008 changed as quickly as the Dow leaped and sank. In the past year I had eight different jobs and moved from Arizona to Chicago. I lost ten pounds from the strain, and almost lost my mind! It was so worth it. I am still trying to embrace this dynamic and unpredictable thing that is my life. Tell me, what changes did your year bring?

I wish you all the fullest of years, and hope 2009 brings you all health, joy, satisfaction, and lots of your favorite fruit (more on that later)!