Maybe if I had found this earlier I wouldn’t be in dire need of a beach vacation. I know it is sick and there may be something wrong with me but I love this clip so much. It instantly transports me to a peaceful place. How can something so wrong feel so right?

(Found here, thanks to the very droll Drollgirl who led me there.)

I am not a fan of winter. I spend my days shuffling around the house in my bathrobe doing my best Howard Hughes impersonation waiting for spring to arrive. My winter activities are reduced to advanced hibernation, hiding from people as much as possible, eating lots of carbs and staring at the television until my mind is adequately numbed.

Here then are my top choices for temporarily melting a frozen winter-hating heart:

1. Almost anything involving Will Ferrell, especially Anchorman. I love love love Will Ferrell. He is shameless and I love him for that. I am proud to let my low brow humour flag fly.

2. Zoolander- Cheap laughs of the immature variety. (See Will Ferrell above.)

3. This is Spinal Tap, a classic.

4. Anything by Wes Anderson for the soundtracks alone. Where else can I hear Portuguese versions of David Bowie songs.

5. An Officer and a Gentleman - because a young Richard Gere can warm the loins and I never get tired of the final scene when he whisks Debra Winger away from her boring factory job and she gets to wear his hat. Way to go Paula!

6. Now Voyager with Betty Davis. I love how she is a frumpy downtrodden old maid with unkempt eyebrows, has a breakdown, gets a make over at the sanatorium and comes back with groomed brows, goes on a cruise and finds forbidden and tragic love. Bette Davis is the best.

7. Stella Dallas with Barbara Stanwick, another feisty dame who has my utmost love and respect. Sometimes despite everything you have to give in and cry your eyes out and this heart breaker is guaranteed to deliver.

8. Team America, because I am a fourteen year old boy trapped in a woman’s body.

9. Flight of the Conchords. Not a movie, but a brilliant TV show, guaranteed to delight with its giddy goofiness.

10. Dr. Zhivago, because I could swim in Omar Sharif’s liquidy eyes forever and regardless of how cold and bleak the winter gets it’ll never look as cold and bleak as Russia during the Bolshevik revolution.

Bread shoes, where have you been all my life? At long last my winter fantasies of being enveloped in a carbohydrate cocoon are being realized.

Between productive hours spent staring at the wall and wondering who I can pick a fight with I discovered yummychummy, a lovely blog. This woman is my new hero. She found bread shoes and she takes beautiful photographs of dapper smiling dogs. It has briefly thawed my frozen winter heart.

Winter Songs from Crush Design on Vimeo.

I saw this lovely animated video on Poppytalk, a most delightful and dreamy blog and was instantly smitten. I love this song and have the Winter Songs CD, one of the few Christmas albums I can bear during the festive season. This song makes me feel sweet, nostalgic and melancholy. I feel even more walloped by sticky sweet melancholy now that I have watched the video.

It makes my heart ache a little because it reminds me of one of my closest friends and how she and I are no longer friends. Long sad story but the two little animated figures remind me of her and I (I’m the bespectacled one, having had very similar glasses for most of my life until a few years ago when I finally discovered the wonders of laser eye surgery). Losing that friendship was a sad episode from 2009. The video makes me sad and lonesome but it is sweet and lovely nonetheless. It makes me want to bundle up, have a solitary walk in the cold air and feel a little wistful, tragic and wise.

I love making New Year’s resolutions.  I believe wholeheartedly that every new year will be the magical year that I make myself over and become a fabulous, dynamic version of myself. Alas, it has yet to happen. Basically I can cross out the date and have the same list year after year. Luckily, hope is a stubborn beast and past failures do little to dampen my enthusiasm for the new year to come.

Knowing myself as I do, I have decided to spare myself the public declarations that inevitably expose my shortcomings and delusions. That is not to say that I don’t have a long and extensive list.  It is just much easier and less humiliating to make secret lists that I do not have to be accountable for.

Unable to resist making a list during list making season, however, I can share my top five favourite resolutions from friends:

1. My friend who planned to chew her food more.
2. My friend who resolved to not eat to the point of pain. Actually this one was mine. Unfortunately, one week into January I must admit that gluttony prevails.
3. My friend who proclaimed that “For the benefit of all, I resolve to be more social this year.”
4. My friend who declared that she would only eat baked goods that she had baked herself or were baked by someone she knew. So far, this has lead to her insisting on meeting the baker at a restaurant when she wanted to finish her meal with a chocolate cookie.
5. The seven year old who pronounced that his resolution was to hit the dart board this year when he plays darts.

Despite my secret lists and inevitable failures I am nonetheless looking forward to a transformative year. If nothing else, I am touched by the tenaciousness optimism, blind that it is, that continues to burn brightly in my secret list filled journals.