Quick clothing-related update: Our stash of shirts from Print Mojo is going fast, but we've ordered a whole bunch more in all sizes. They should be available in around two weeks -- we'll post when the new batch is up. In the meantime, this is our first time working with this vendor, so if you have any problems, please let us know.

It's late January 1981 and for some reason, "Same Old Lang Syne" by Dan Fogelberg is played heavily on the radio. Shouldn't a song with that title have been out a month earlier? Regardless, it's one of the most evocative songs I will ever know. He steals behind her in the frozen foods; she went to hug him and she spilled her purse; and then it was off to her car to drink the six-pack they bought at the liquor store because all the bars were closed on Christmas Eve. Dan Fogelberg wrote those scenes like people talk, like people live.

Then as now, I see a particular Foodtown and a particular parking lot where I can imagine Dan and his old lover toasting one year going and one year coming while I'm inside the store rolling a cart down that very same frozen foods aisle, tossing a bag of Bird's Eye Mixed Vegetables onto a pile of groceries I have been instructed to pick up if I want to use the Ford later. There's a Kohl's now where that Foodtown was — and a Bed Bath & Beyond sits on the site of the formerly adjacent liquor store. Still, I see it. And isn't it, well, odd that at least around here on the day in December that 56-year-old Dan Fogelberg died in Maine that we experienced a nasty nor'easter in which the snow turned into rain?

"The Language of Love" by Dan Fogelberg is the No. 352 Song of All-Time, but I maintain a particular soft spot for "Same Old Lang Syne," the only chart hit I know of whose title more or less refers to my birthday...and whose lyrics make me think of buying frozen peas.

P.S. Very first word of "Same Old Lang Syne" is Met.