Let's do this thing

Miscellany for a new year

Like so many things, New Year’s is an arbitrary concept. Most years, I celebrate it the same way I celebrate a regular weeknight: in bed with a good book. This year, though, I went to a friend’s party. We left early so as not to deal with drunks on the drive home, then watched the ABC 7 New Year’s special, which took over for local revelries after Ryan Seacrest and Megan Thee Stallion rang in 2024 for the Eastern time zone.

I love Chicago. It’s a major global city, but culturally, it thinks it’s a small town. And so, the Channel 7 coverage included a cameo from Sr. Jean (okay, she’s an international celebrity), music from Liv Warfield, a local musician with a national reputation who was once part of Prince’s New Power Generation, and then a live countdown from the Whiting, Indiana, pierogi drop. It’s a thing!

Anyway, I’m hoping that having a more stereotypical New Year’s Eve celebration makes for a good 2024.

On New Year’s Day, I went to a yoga class at a neighborhood exercise studio. The class has a special New Year’s offering called Hair of the Down Dog. As you would expect in a major global city, it was a multicultural crowd. But in true local fashion, the studio is in a space that used to belong to a taproom (a bar/liquor store, which seems to be a Chicago-only thing); the taproom moved to a larger space down the street.

I came home from the workout and made tomato soup. I swear by this simple recipe:

1 6-oz can tomato paste

24 oz. milk (you can refill the tomato soup can four times)

1 teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon celery seed

Heat in a saucepan, whisking constantly until smooth and heated through. Serve with Ritz crackers.

If you are looking for New Year/New You advice, I’ll give you one weird tip: review your subscriptions and cancel any you don’t use. If you want to keep one that looks expensive, contact the provider and ask if they are running special promotions. I just let Audible go. You can always re-subscribe, often at a discounted rate to bring you back. (Audible’s offering me half-price, but I need to listen to the books I already have.) Keeping with the Chicago-centric theme of this issue, the city now assesses a 9% tax on certain software as a service transactions, including ChatGPT subscriptions. That should give you Chicagoans an incentive to review your credit card charges.

With that, here's Liv Warfield to carry us into the year:

How are you getting 2024 launched? Please share in the comments!