Shatter your self-imposed limits!!! The process of change touches almost every area of your life and paradoxically challenges you to establish a long-term plan.

This is my horoscope for 2010. I’m a Capricorn, which means I’m not used to seeing horoscopes like that one. Capricorns are the Poindexters of the Zodiac. We’re practical, predictable. In fact, we goatheads are downright boring, astrologically speaking.

So, true to my Capricornian nature, I have no intentions of shattering anything in 2010. Baby steps, small improvements are my plans for this year. New carpet instead of a new house. Call people more, Facebook less. More yoga, less working through lunch. More vegetables, less red meat. Love more, complain less.

I am also completely ignoring a book I received for my birthday: “Skinny Bitchin’ – A Get Off Your Ass Journal to Help You Change Your Life, Achieve Your Goals and Rock Your World!”

I don’t want my world to be rocked. I like my world as it is. I also don’t want my ass kicked by a skinny bitch. FYI, the Skinny Bitches are two writers who look like Barbie dolls. Their claim to fame is a tough-love diet book. Here’s a pearly nugget from their latest tome: “Whatever you’ve been dying to do or try but have been too scared, today is the day! Carpe diem, bitch!”

Sooooo happy not to be sitting a cubicle away from this person. I’d be dying to kill her.

Corpus delicti, bitch!

Ten years ago on New Year’s Eve, I wasn’t partying like it was 1999. I was hunkered down expecting the lights to go out and mass chaos to ensue. I had been suckered in by the Y2K scare — remember that one? I spent most of 1998 covering the high tech industry for an Arizona newspaper, and Y2K was THE story. It was supposed to be the end of the world as we know it.

That night we stayed home with Bob’s young kids who had come for their holiday visit. Most of the night we sat on our big leather couch, waiting to see what midnight would bring.

As everyone knows, real disaster came, but it wasn’t on New Year’s Day 2000. It happened a little more than a year later on a bright blue September day. And there’s no way that any of us could have been ready for it.

Fast forward to tonight — I’m still staying in, still sitting on the same, now dumpy, couch with a couple of young kids on New Year’s Eve. But I’m grayer, fatter and maybe a bit wiser. Much has happened to me over the past decade, most importantly Boy and Girl. If motherhood has taught me anything it’s this: It’s never the terror of the night that gets you — it’s the arrow that flies by day. The expected horror almost never happens, but the unexpected catastrophe sometimes does, and there’s no way to be ready for it. So there’s no point to live in fear, is there?

I’m not afraid of what 2010 will bring. This is not a night for hunkering down. It’s a time for looking up.

I don’t know how to break this to my mom, but I just heard that “As the World Turns” is going off the air next year. Mom has been watching “As the World Turns” for 48 years – which means she’s been keeping up with the likes of Nancy, Chris, Lisa and Bob longer than she’s been keeping up with me.

When I was little, she took a break everyday from housework to watch her stories. Or she watched while ironing shirts – shaking the iron at the TV, warning Betsy, “Don’t listen to him! He’s a snake in the grass!” She watches them still, but I long ago lost track of the leading snake.

I watched the stories daily until first grade; after that I could only see them during sick days, Christmas vacations and summers. But it wasn’t hard to catch up – Mom always filled in the gaps. Over the long years, there were fewer cases of total amnesia and more unplanned pregnancies, kidnappings and murders. I haven’t seen the soaps since college, but I’ve heard some of them have gotten as wild as alien abductions.

Mom was sad last year when “Guiding Light” went off the air, but “As the World Turns” was always her favorite. The Lisa character, played by Eileen Fulton for 50 years, is like an old family friend, albeit, one who’s been married nine times.

They say that “As the World Turns” might continue online, and I hope it does. Because then, finally, my mom will get herself a computer.

What is it about the cold, cold mornings, the dark nights and short days that stirs these fantasies in my head? It’s all I can think about, from the time I wake to the time I go to sleep. Thank God it’s warm here most of the time, because otherwise I would be driven crazy by the thought of it. Yes, gentle readers, I’m talking about FOOD.

All I want to do is bake something warm and sweet, whip up a big hot vat of something steamy. Then lie on the couch with a Snuggie and eat a giant bowl full, watching black-and-white movies all day. If I lived up North, I’d turn into Jabba the Hut.