Now this is a new year. Really new, at least for me. I begin 2009 by saying goodbye to my job at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

I've been climbing the stairs each day at 34 Blvd. of the Allies for 14 years, sometimes with a bounce and sometimes with a heavy heart. And I have never had such mixed feelings as I do now, cleaning out my desk, pitching or packing up all the memories. It's a fitting end to 2008, which I spent on a rollercoaster. I hate rollercoasters.

I won awards. I took my 81-year-old mother's car keys away. I made some new friends and lost a couple of old ones. I spent two wild, wonderful weeks blogging my way across Canada. I moved my confused, increasingly helpless mother across Pennsylvania and into a nursing home. I was elected president of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. I took over my mother's bills and bookkeeping and watched the muscle for an auction house haul away my parents' furniture, records, books. I traveled for three weeks with 11 foreign journalists on a fellowship that took us to Hawaii and the State Department.

I left my job without having a new one.

The whole past year, I was either crowing with joy or fighting back tears. I ended it doing both at once.

My entire 30s were spent staring into screens and talking on phones at the PG; I've been through two publishers, two executive editors, two managing editors, five features editors, more software and databases than I can remember, several desks and at least a dozen waves of training in pagination, HTML code, phone etiquette, personality analysis and harassment.

(And if you've never been trained in harassment, you're doing it all wrong.)

It didn't hit me that my life was changing until I cleaned out my desk. My drawers held a time capsule.

The tools of what used to be my trade, for example: a pica pole and proportion wheel for measuring and sizing photographs for layout. When I started at the PG, we drew page layouts on pieces of gridded paper, rolled them up and put them in canisters with leather fastenings and shot them up pneumatic tubes to the composing room. I'd make some predictable joke about then going home in my horse-drawn carriage, but I could never afford a carriage.

And besides, this was in the '90s. The 1990s. There are plenty of older hands around the newsroom who remember stick telephones, a switchboard with wired pegs, indoor smoking, booze stashes and pay raises.

No bottles in my desk, but plenty of toys, books, promotional pens, PR pitches, Christmas cards, e-mail printouts and lovingly preserved yellowing newspaper pages. Some I took home. Some I stared at, unable to figure out why I put them aside. Was that my brilliant headline? What year was this? 2003? It's a little late to enter it in a contest now.

Some of the e-mails reminded me what fine minds and sharp wits I've had the privilege of working with. So did the promotional postcards for "Off the Record," our annual satiric musical. I've performed in all eight, and I've written songs for most of them, and I'm sure the Capitol Steps would have recruited me by now if all the songs hadn't been about rain, transit delays and Market Square.

Letters and e-mails from readers were like musty old friends. The e-mail from Gene Weingarten of The Washington Post calling me "funny and smart." The four-page handwritten fan letter from Myron Cope. The crabbed anonymous scrawl that began "You must be a sick person" and ended "I hope you don't have children."

And the discovery, buried in the back of an overloaded drawer, that made me exclaim out loud.

"I had a STAPLER?"

I packed up the keepers and hauled them out to my car with a tear in my eye. And, of course, ink all over my hands.

I may not work here anymore, but I'll still be writing my column for the PG. Hope that comes as good news to you, as it does to me. And may we all have a truly happy new year.