My wife, Birdie, gets appropriately irritated with me when I suggest New Year’s resolutions she might want to consider for herself. “Stick to your own,” she tells me. So it is with some trepidation that I suggest one resolution for a whole bunch of people … the 186 incoming members of the 126th Legislature. Here it is: “Let’s work together. Republicans, Democrats, Independents, Red Sox fans, Yankees fans — all of us.”

It is comforting to think of death as a passing rather than an end. In that vein, I prefer to think of Steve Jobs’ final words as editorial commentary: “Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.”

When my husband, Paul, and I were married in 1986, we didn’t buy any new furniture. Our bed was literally his bachelor pad, my mother provided an old dining room table and I toted along the faithful desk that had once belonged to my grandfather.

That’s right. Put the entire state — from Juneau to Deadhorse, from the Bering Strait to the Beaufort Sea — on the auction block.

I hate stakeouts, and yet there I was, sitting in a car, keeping an eye on the building across the street and waiting for something new and interesting to happen.

In response to the horrific mass murder in Newtown, Conn., President Barack Obama insisted that all of us have an obligation to do what we can to prevent such acts of brutal violence from recurring.

In the wake of the tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Kennebec Behavioral Health has received a number of calls asking what we can do about it. In reality, we are faced with the same sense of grief, outrage and helplessness that plagues the rest of our society.

That noise you heard this morning was your own sigh of relief. The tensions, impossibly high expectations, and frantic shopping that, sadly, define Christmas for so many, are over. Even if you don’t engage in this seasonal frenzy, you can’t help but be exhausted by it.

It has been 40 years since the last astronauts left the moon. That anniversary, Dec. 14, has put some prominent technologists in a funk.

Happy holidays! So, how do we move beyond schools for the last century to ones appropriate for the 21st?