I did it! I signed a 110,000 tipped-in sheets for my new book, Everything is Tuberculosis, and I lectrojogged them, and then I put them into boxes, and now they're off to the printer in Virginia! Let's get a check on the weather.

Good morning, Hank. It's Tuesday. We had eight inches of snow last night and now, it's quite cold.

Ow!

So Hank, I don't like to brag, but I think that I experienced the first ever signing-related ankle injury last week when, uh, my foot fell asleep because I was signing my name over and over again in the same position and then the doorbell rang and I got up to get the doorbell and my foot was asleep and so, I guess it didn't know what to do, and I put all my weight on the outside of my foot, and it like, crumpled over and sprained my ankle and, uh, it hurts.

I would show you the ankle in question, but this is the internet, so no free feet pics. Also, I think that its, like, black and blueness might violate YouTube's terms of service.

Oh, look at that, if it isn't the cold gray light of dawn!

Hello, Potato. What if the camera gets closer 'cause you don't like it? He's the new Yeti!

It's strange to think that my parents were alive for the Moon landing, and their parents were alive during the Great Depression, and their parents were alive for the electrification of earth, and their parents were alive for the U.S. civil war, like, I wonder what my grandkids will say I was alive for. Maybe I'll be like, "Oh, when I was a kid, we didn't have, uh, these magic wands that could fit in our pockets!" or "W- when I was a kid, it snowed regularly in Indianapolis!" When I was a kid, about 1.8 million people died every year of tuberculosis. Now, it's around 1.25 million. That's progress – it's real progress, it's worth celebrating – but at that rate of decline (33% over 40 years), it will take over a century for us to get tuberculosis deaths much below 500,000 per year, which is absurd for a curable and preventable disease! So how do we hold these competing and equally true ideas at the same time? Yes, the progress is real, and no, the progress is not acceptable.

Sometimes, when it's real quiet outside, I think about the William Carlos Williams line, "the wise trees stand sleeping in the cold."

So Everything is Tuberculosis comes out in just over two months. The tour will be announced tomorrow. I'm sorry in advance if I'm not going to your city or near your city. I am however going to thirteen cities which, I think, is the most I can do without potentially collapsing into a heap. So hopefully, I'll be coming to an auditorium near you, but if not, well, that is why I signed all of those books, so that you could have an autographed copy regardless of your geographic situation. I'm so excited about the advance readers copies, by the way. In fact, I'll give a couple of these away to random commenters.

Every new year, I write myself two letters: one that looks back on the year that was and every thing that happened, and then I write a letter looking forward to the year to come and stating – not goals exactly – but intentions. I used to do it with goals – I would have all of these very fancy, very specific and measurable goals that I would set out for myself to maximize productivity – but then one year I had all of these goals, and you got cancer, Hank? And I realized that telling the year what will happen in it is a fool's errand, because, in the end, the year decides.

So now I only have hopes and prayers and intentions, and this year, I have two professional ones: the first is just to support the Everything is Tuberculosis book and my work on tuberculosis in general without, you know, losing it. Like, I have over a hundred days of travel this year and I'm a little worried that I might collapse into a series of increasingly small polygons until I cease to exist. But I should be fine, that's a lot of travel for a homebody, but on the other hand, I'm very grateful and excited to do that travel because I know exactly why I'm doing it.

And then my other professional goal is to finish a draft of a new novel which I'm scared to even say out loud, but yeah, that is the goal. And then all my other goals just revolve around making my life less complicated and overwhelming. Speaking of complicated and overwhelming, how about the beauty of Earth? God. What an underrated planet.

Hank, I'll see you on Friday.