Tonight is New Year's Eve and once again we plan to celebrate it with riotous abandon.

As usual, Elsbeth and I will each find a metal pot from the kitchen and a wooden ladle or spoon from the kitchen drawer and at the stroke of midnight we will totter outside to the front yard and bang on the pots like crazy people and shout Happy New Year to the neighbors and any others who might by chance be passing by on our dead end street.

We have much to celebrate.

Number one is our survival amid the greatest glut of bad news we have ever heard.

From never ending losses in our endless war in Iraq and Afghanistan to the collapse of the banking system and crash of the stock market to the national housing disgrace, the national disasters of floods and forest fires, the dismal records of the Huskies, the Seahawks, the Mariners and the loss of the Sonics, the gang wars in Seattle and Tacoma, the diseased Elm trees in Burien, to the miserable traffic mess on our highways and byways.

It has been one avalanche of gloom.

On top of all that I have had an ingrown toe nail, gout in my big toe, kidney stones, sciatica, terrible golf scores, no fish, three weeks of no garbage pickup, a relentless head cold, and I personally crashed stepping out of the car landing in a snow drift when I went to pick up Elsbeth at her doctor's office.

Lucky me. I was unable to get up alone so I did what any red blooded warrior would, I yelled and two husky guys heard me and hoisted me out of my predicament with no injury.

Like I said, luck ruled in my favor, again. One man was a salesman for pacemakers and the other was a man who has a great story I will be doing next month.

I predict that this coming year will see a remarkable turnaround in the fortunes, not only for myself, but for our community and the nation.

When I make the coffee in the morning I first reach into the cupboard and find the paper filters.

After fitting one carefully in the drip coffeemaker I reach for a glass jar with a rubber ring under its cap that keeps it airtight. It has a clasp that holds the lid down.

Usually, I just flip the catch and it opens but this morning I found the lid sitting alongside the jar, in three pieces, two glass halves and a rubber band sealer.

It was easy to take the two scoops of coffee for the pot but I could not figure out to put the lid back together or why Elsbeth, my German rocket scientist, left it in pieces.

No matter how I tried, I could not make it go together. So I gave up, knowing she would be down shortly.

As a former Boeing aero mechanic and test electrician, I once provided the expertise almost single-handedly to keep B17s, B29s.and B50s flying.

But this coffee keeper thing baffled me. So I just left it for her.

Sure enough, she spotted it immediately and zip-zip she put the poorly designed contraption back in place.

This was embarrassing. After all, I had fixed hundreds of my screw-ups of my own makings both at home and at work.

One time I was assigned to repair a jagged rivet hole in the side of a B29 fuselage made by some incompetent.

It was about a raggedy quarter-inch round so I knew a rivet would leak a little and maybe let some air or rain in. So I tried to round it out with a rat-tail file and little by little the hole got bigger and the files got bigger also.

It was soon about half an inch .I had never seen a half inch rivet and I knew a patch over the whole area would look funny.

I thought about duct tape but knew an inspector would have my heart on a stick. Luckily it was close to quitting time. The plane had moved away the next morning.

Elsbeth could have fixed it, I am sure.

When she was a girl, she built instrument panels on Messerschmitt fighter planes in Hamburg and, of course, was not allowed to put the altimeter into the hole for the fuel gauge.

She is still fiercely precise and would have been a great brain surgeon (I call her Weiner Von Brain) or Chief Fly Speck remover in a pepper factory.

Who else in the whole world would wash every fresh blueberry before she puts them on my bran flakes?

Who else dresses top to toes like she was meeting the Obama couple for lunch at Sal's Deli?

Who else wears designer mittens when she is pulling the dead blossoms off the geraniums?

Cisco never has been to our house.

The other day I somehow got some grape jam on my cashmere sweater she had laid out for me for our trip to the grocery where she sometimes bumps into another fashion queen from Germany named Ursula.

Elsbeth spotted the tiny jam spot on my sweater, made me stand outside the car, take off the sweater, reached into the back seat and put on a fresh sweater she just happened to have in a bag.