There was a 20SB prompt a few weeks ago about the things we collect, and I immediately thought of my beloved sock monkeys. I never really intended to have a "collection" of them. One minute, I was standing in a Cracker Barrel and thinking that the sock monkey in my hand was the only thing I liked about that place; the next, I had a sock monkey tea set and sock monkey slippers and a family of five adorable sock monkeys smiling at me.

Pictured from left to right: Itty Bitty, Sugarplum the Violent, Cuppycake, Pierre, and Juan Pedro.

Juan Pedro was the first sock monkey I ever owned. As I said, I bought him at a Cracker Barrel and then asked the Internet to give him a name. He had too much personality for me, so I gave him his own Twitter account, Facebook account, and email address. (Some Central American TV celebrity whose name is Juan Pedro is really bummed that I got to the name first, but hey, I'm the queen of the Internet. Buzz off.)

Years later, my dad brought home Itty Bitty, who came with adoption papers and all of the cuteness in the world. Everyone wanted to know when she would get her own Twitter account and the like, but people, she's way too young for that. She and the others do work with Juan Pedro to manage all of my social media updates, though. I pay them in Scooby Snacks and hugs.

The third member of the team was Pierre, a gift from Cuddles for my birthday. His name was given to him by the fine folks at Pier 1 Imports, and it just sort of fits. (I saw him on a Pier 1 commercial months before my birthday and had been secretly hoping someone would send him my way. Thanks, Joey!)

Cuppycake showed up a few days later when I had my birthday party with my immediate family. I think my mom feels guilty about refusing to let me have a cat, so she's drowning her guilt—and me—in sock monkeys. I'm a little wary of Cuppycake, who has "Happy Birthday" written on her tummy in Comic Sans every day of the year. However, the other sock monkeys say she throws really great parties, so she stays. I guess she's the Pinkie Pie of the bunch.

Sugarplum the Violent was a stocking stuffer for Christmas, and she has a clip on the top of her head. She really isn't violent, but the other sock monkeys were afraid of the clip when they saw it, mistaking it for a weapon. I'm keeping it on her head in case the group needs to defend themselves against zombie Beanie Babies or whatever.

Anyway, that's my family of sock monkeys. If you'd like to meet them, I recommend hosting a tea party—real or virtual—and sending a formal invitation or five.

I just finished reading The Salmon of Doubt, a collection of essays and articles and whatnots written by Douglas Adams. (He's the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, among other things.)

Short review: mostly good.

The book was a gift from one (two?) of my favorite friends, and I absolutely love Douglas Adams. That said, I really wanted to love every part of this book. For the most part, I suppose I did. The beginning was filled with tidbits about Douglas Adams' life and interests. It reminded me a bit of the beginning of Stephen King's On Writing. The end held a few wonderful short stories along with an unfinished draft of one of Adams' next projects. That part was nothing short of delightful. Something about his writing makes me glad to be alive. He was so clever and so funny and so full of surprising ways to say things. I couldn't bother stopping to jot down my favorite quotes, but I did take photographs on my phone and have transcribed and assembled the best bits below.

But before I get back to the happy part, I feel compelled to comment that the middle portion was a bit of a chore to get through. At times, it was even heartbreaking. Some pieces were entertaining enough, as they related to Douglas Adams' penchant for technology. He wrote about his first time using a hand-held computer in the bathtub and his hope that, one day, he could walk into his office with his portable computer and have the contents automatically appear on his desktop computer. (Hello, Dropbox!) Not as riveting for me as his fiction, but it was an interesting glance into the life of someone I very much respect.

(Actually, reading a few of the essays reminded me of a secret fear I have: that after I die, the horrible things I've started writing or even finished writing will be dug up from old shoeboxes and scraped out of old floppy disks and stolen from my personal computers and published internationally in some sort of postmortem shame festival/museum.)

I suppose if the middle portion had been just that, I would have muddled through it and appreciated the whole book without comment. But there was an awful lot about Adams' atheism in that bit, and it left me with the impression that Adams found all Christians to be idiots. Finding out that this guy whose work I very much admire would've found me to be absolutely moronic? Maybe it's silly, but it made me really sad. It'd be like telling me that Kate Chopin only befriended people who used Comic Sans or that Dave Brubeck hated anyone who used semicolons. It's one thing for a personal idol to believe the polar opposite of what you do; it's another to find out that idol would've disliked you because of it.

Maybe I got bent out of shape for nothing, but . . . too late. The middle portion of the book left a bad taste in my mouth, and it's really a tribute to Douglas Adams' writing that his unfinished snippet of a novel was so good that it redeemed the rest of the material in The Salmon of Doubt for me.

So without further ado, here are a few of my favorite quotes:

Jane, who is much better at reading guide books than I am (I always read them on the way back to see what I missed, and it's often quite a shock), discovered something wonderful in the book she was reading. Did I know, she asked, that Brisbane was originally founded as a penal colony for convicts who committed new offences after they had arrived in Australia?

I spent a good half hour enjoying that single piece of information. It was wonderful. There we British sat, poor grey sodden creatures, huddling under our grey northern sky that seeped like a rancid dish cloth, busy sending those we wished to punish most severely to sit in bight sunlight on the coast of the Tasman Sea at the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef and maybe do some surfing too. No wonder the Australians have a particular kind of smile that they reserve exclusively for use on the British.

It does sort of make you wonder. Was there a criminal mastermind secretly behind this plan? Or are British people just crazy? Also, "[seeping] like a rancid dish cloth" is a brilliant way to describe a sky.

My favourite piece of information is that Branwell Brontë, brother of Emily and Charlotte, died standing up leaning against a mantelpiece, in order to prove it could be done.

That is not quite true, in fact. My absolute favourite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees.

I just retweeted that sloth fact within the last month. Great minds?

"Josh," said a voice in a kind of Swedish-Irish accent.

That is a delightfully impossible amount of accent to cram into one syllable.

He was immediately glad that he had decided to build in a brief period of mental preparation. Almost immediately number one, a large duvet of a woman, came around the corner . . .

I don't ever want to be fat, but if that's my destiny, please refer to me as a "large duvet of a woman."

Dirk had recently moved to this new office—new to him, that was; the actual building was old and dilapidated and remained standing more out of habit than from any inherent structural integrity . . .

I like the idea of buildings having habits.

The following morning the weather was so foul it hardly deserved the name, and Dirk decided to call it Stanley instead.

Stanley wasn't a good downpour. Nothing wrong with a good downpour for clearing the air. Stanley was the sort of thing you needed a good downpour to clear the air of. Stanley was muggy, close, and oppressive, like someone large and sweaty pressed up against you in a tube train. Stanley didn't rain, but every so often he dribbled on you.

Dirk stood outside in the Stanley.

See? Delightful. The writing is absolutely delightful. (No, you find another adjective.) That could have been a terribly boring and commonplace description of weather, but it is not. It is Stanley, and it is wonderful.

I've been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate,
A poet, a pawn and a king.
I've been up and down and over and out
But I know one thing:
Each time I find myself flat on my face,
I pick myself up and get back in the race.

I wanted 2012 to be the year when I magically jumped from the life I have to the life of an independent, healthy, charming, and responsible adult. I also wanted my pixie cut to instantly turn into Rapunzel hair. Some sort of portal between here and England would've been nice, too.

Reality check: none of those things happened!

But looking back, I am so proud of myself for rolling with the punches. I don't have a very good track record of dealing with change or adversity. Bad grade on a test? Curl up with The Lord of the Rings movies for twelve hours instead of studying. Tough times at the office? Spend every evening playing World of Warcraft instead of figuring out how to make things better. Feeling bad about watching movies and playing video games instead of dealing with life? Read a book. Watch Doctor Who. Do laundry. Re-organize earrings to be sorted by size instead of color. Re-organize earrings to be sorted by color instead of size.

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Basically, my coping mechanism is to ignore problems and hope they go away.

It works out super well .01% of the time, and admitting that has been the first step in stopping the madness. The next part seems to be surrounding myself with people and things that inspire me to keep my chin up, to get back on my feet, and so on. It's the whole "you are what you eat" philosophy except that I don't typically eat books, tweets, or friends. Still, I'm making changes for the better in all those areas, and I'm really excited about it.

Since one of the areas I'm focusing on first is my financial situation, I've started blogging for Dimespring. I'm part of a group of 30 people from all stages of life sharing tales or thoughts related to personal finance. Being part of that community has been an ongoing source of encouragement for me, and I invite you to check out what I've written (duh) but also what the other peeps are writing.

I'm also taking care of what I ingest via social media, unfollowing people left and right if they don't consistently bring me joy, inspiration, and/or really good belly laughs. Some very good friends haven't made the cut, but I hope they'll forgive me and let me keep in touch some other way. (Let's meet up for doughnuts! Cupcakes? Listen, if you don't want to share sugary delights with me, maybe we shouldn't be friends anyway.)

Surrounding myself with the good and keeping out the bad also applies to what I read (books, magazines, blog posts), what I listen to (podcasts, music), and kittens (cannot live without one). It feels good to fuel myself with awesomeness on a regular basis. I could probably bring about world peace or something if I put my mind to it.

So if 2012 was the year of learning not to back down or hide, 2013 is the year of putting up that shield and plowing forward through whatever crazy stuff lies ahead. And gosh dang it, I can't wait.

And maybe it is also the year my hair grows out twenty inches overnight. A GIRL CAN DREAM.