Driving home for X-mas

We're heading home for Christmas, as usual - since moving to a new home in 2006, we commute six hours to our family home - and we leave on Saturday.
I've written an article about handling the holidays in a stressless way, but I know that I'm going to spend the whole week running around - visiting family members in hospital - my father and his grandfather are both sick - so we're spending our time between families - and fitting in whatever we can around the rest of our time at home. It's odd to think that I lived there for so long and it feels like a different world now.
I'm finally coming to terms with our move - and I'm hoping that as soon as we've gotten settled in when we come back that I can continue to rebuild the work I've started putting foundations in place for.
I do have a question for everyone though.
one of the traditions my partner and I started after moving here was curling up in front of the fire and talking about our year - usually as close to New Year as we can manage. We set up our resolutions, and discuss goals and work out what, as a family, we want to achieve.
Do you have a ritual - or goals already? Are you looking forward to 2009 and what you can achieve?

Can you step back from your online life?

Image by uomoelettrico via FlickrI'll be honest with you, I've spent the last two weeks soul searching and wondering what I'm supposed to do with myself because of an accident that occured this last September.
I've always been a fairly independant, sharp articulate woman. I could always spell just about anything (other than my i before e's - and when my fingers go slightly faster than my brain) but at the moment, I'm finding it difficult.
My memory is shot - and there are definitive gaps where stories, characters, and plotlines used to reside - I think. The only reason I *know* the stories are missing are because I have notes that otherwise make no sense.

So the soul searching is kinda hard. I know that I have some sort of brain damage - though, I have to say, it fees really bad to say that. Like I'm belittling that kind of injury, because I'm almost as functional as I was. But I've been going looking for a lot of approval lately.
My partner noticed it first. I stopped writing and wouldn't continue till he told me it was 'all right'. Normally I have to beat him and other freinds off with metaphorical crowbars and they have to distract me to read anything that isn't second to last draft.
I did it again later in the week. I wouldn't continue with the story I was narrating till someone told me to and got REALLY frustrated, because I couldn't say what I was waiting for.

And that brings me full circle. I AM waaaay reliant on other people's opinions - and to be honest, I think that many writers and bloggers are. We seek approval all over the place, and when we don't get it, some of us start to wilt. I never used to 'need' approval, or at least, so I thought, but reading back some of the stuff that I've said and done this last year, because a freind said that I wasn't doing as 'they' expected, or because someon had attacked one of my principles, I'm beginning to wonder if that's part of the deeper problem that's taking hold. I wonder if I'm being 'wierd' like this because I've got nothing left to relate to and need to restart with *just* writing.
So I put my websites on 'dark'. It'll give me a chance to write, and find myself again, as a gift for Christmas. And to be honest, from some of the emails I've had, I think some of you need to do the same.
Give yourself the gift of joy this year and don't keep putting 'it' off. I did and I'm not REALLY regretting it. I might get a second chance, and just watch me, I'm already just itching to grab it with both hands and never let go.