My mom used to write a page-long Christmas letter to old friends of hers, a lot of them people I never met. She'd design it in the word processing program on computer and add photos like they were clipart. Once I got into writing, I wrote my own segment of the letter, then eventually wrote the entire letter a couple of years. But I've never snail-mailed my own Christmas letter, apparently. In a digital age, there's little reason to, as most of my friends like to keep in touch via text message or Facebook. In lieu of a snail-mail letter (I'll send cards instead, late as usual), here's a digital summary of my life this past year! Sarah's Christmas Update  God has been incredibly good to me this year. I promise this isn't a humblebrag . Here are the things I get asked about the most. The most exciting: I bought a house in June! An adorable two-bedroom place with a garage and beautiful hardwood floors. Email me if you'd like to see pictures! I

I do drink coffee... On occasion. By which I mean, once a week, if that. I'm not addicted. I plan to keep it that way after following a friend of mine's account of his coffee cleanse. The "cleanse," or cold-turkey coffee quittance, began Friday. Nearly all his tweets since then chronicle the trials and tribulations of an addict's sudden abstinence. And they're amusing. Yea tho I walk thru the aisle of the freshly ground coffee, I will fear no evil #coffeecleanseday1 Who ever thought cheap church coffee could be so tempting? # coffeecleanseday2 Apparently there is a direct connection between drinking coffee and remembering to use deodorant. # coffeecleanseday2 Nerves are short. I got mad at a spatula. A FLIPPIN' SPATULA. # coffeecleanseday3 Can't read my own hand writing. Dialed five variations of the same numbers. Never did reach a real phone. I'm losing it. # coffeecleanseday3 Before you ask, I have no idea if the tweet

It's snowing out, and it looks gorgeous, as the first snow often does. I've decided I really like the look of my adorable little house in the snow. It's like Little House on the Prairie, but 1920's city edition. Wait, somebody still thinks Jesus was white ?? The maker's schedule vs. the manager's schedule... Most powerful people are on the manager's schedule. It's the schedule of command. But there's another way of using time that's common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started. A psychologist explains online dating. (Hey, I read The Atlantic. So what?) And in the psychologist's words: "It can expand the pool of potential partners, making available a whole slew of people who otherwise would have been unavailable. That’s a huge, huge benefit. B

It's been a big, busy, exciting weekend. Saturday was my state's press association's annual awards luncheon, and I got an award. Not just one, though. Three ! All I knew going in was that I was getting something, but I figured it'd be third place in some itty bitty category. But I actually got a little certificate for being... punny. That and the other particular awards I got were completely unexpected. (But the award for being punny was the best. Remember, editors love puns. Especially in headlines.) And then today, I played piano . In front of people . And without reading music (because my musical-note-literacy is limited to reading one, maybe two, notes at a time). After years of plinking out notes and chords and then broken chords on the black and white keys, sans lessons, it's finally paid off. (Meaning, when church has absolutely nobody else to play the Christmas carols in December, it's not quite the disaster it could've been. :D )

I've realized a groundbreaking fact this week. All the great composers were German! Bach. Mendelssohn. Handel. Mozart. BEETHOVEN. Wagner. Etc. Granted, there were also good composers who weren't German. Tchaikovsky, to name one. And Rimsky-Korsakov and Vivaldi. But it simply astounds me how many of the traditional classical composers weren't Russian or Italian or French. They were German. Weird, huh?

Note: The following was written three minutes before the end of my 24th birthday. One of the things I hadn't quite figured out was how to celebrate a birthday as an adult. When you're not close enough to your immediate family to just do the whole special homemade-to-order dinner that you've been used to for years, that is. In college, I usually made it home for some weekend around my birthday and we had my favorite dinner -- crabmeat casserole. When I turned 21 I spent half the day doing some spec work for the editor who would end up hiring me for my first job post-college. Then that first year after college, I volunteered at a church dinner on the day I turned 22 (and, of course, ate more than my full of delicious potluck food). I still lived near my family, but I think they were all working or otherwise inescapably occupied. The day I turned 23 -- last year -- I had to work. I managed to escape for a lunch date with my two closest cousins at my favorite restaurant (