Every new year begins with a couple of months of hunkering down here in Maine and making the best of it.

We do that well, it seems.

This is my chance to finally sift through many piles of pending projects and decide which ones to target for completion. The Historical Society, my alter ego, is working on a Web site; there is a continual flow of genealogical queries to be researched and answered; I need to prepare a program on Windham women in history, which will be presented to a group in March; and, of course, the townspeople will be voting in January for a new school-governing group to include the town of Raymond.

All through the discussions among Raymond and Windham residents about consolidating, I was reminded about the many decades Raymond students at the high school level have been coming to Windham High School. Long before the 1950s, which is my era of school days, there were kids from Raymond crossing the border. So, I say, it’s about time.

I expect that these next few weeks will be filled with stuffed mailboxes and lots of phone calls, with offers of preapproved credit cards, chances for free vacations in Tahiti or at an out-of-state ski slope, and dozens of ways to save on car insurance. The fragile economy is a wonderful opportunity for companies to swamp us with direct mail and recorded phone messages. And let’s face it, it works or they wouldn’t be doing it!

A quick scan of the help-wanted classifieds will make you wonder why you don’t have one of those work-at-home jobs, assembling something and making $2,000 a week! Or, my favorite, typing and earning that much or more. I can type really fast, but not fast enough to make a month’s pay in a week.

Many, many years ago when I was a know-it-all 17-year-old, I actually contacted one of these places and received the simple instruction booklet, which as I recall, required placing (and paying for) similar ads in all my local papers. At that time, there was no local paper, and Portland, although blessed with two daily papers, seemed as far away as Chicago. Most important, this “job” required investing my hard-earned babysitting dollars, and would end up a losing situation for me. My father got a good laugh out of my naiveta. But, just like the mass mailings of credit card offers, these classifieds must work, because after all these years they’re still running.

Let’s hope that kids discover the fun of playing outdoors this winter – without their little hand-held communication devices, whatever they are called. I expect someone is already working on a new dictionary to include an abundance of hyphenated words such as text-message, and a lot of words beginning with the letter “i” – reinforcing our obsession with self. 2009 will be interesting.

See you next week.