Two good things about this time of year come to mind:

1. Daylight starts early and it stays light really, really late giving you all day to keep doing stuff.
2. Lots of TV shows are hitting their finales, freeing me up from watchin' ma stories.

I'm going to out myself. I watch too much TV. Way too much TV. Even worse, I've got a long queue of "to start watching." How much TV is too much? Let's stack rank the shows this past year...

Battlestar Galactica: dystopian to a degree that even Rick Deckard hugs his Voight-Kampff machine for comfort. All over now and I'm still meditating on it. Like a big tale from The Bible.

Lost: wow, it really turned it around this year. Well, really with the season finale last year. I totally grooved with the time-travel story and how lots of threads started coming together. And the Jacob episode was great. With every answer there seems to be two more questions. Coming back one more season.

Fringe: I didn't expect to like this after the first few episodes. I was accumulating shows to watch one day when - with what should have been the end of the Snow of 2008 - I went out to continue shoveling a path for Bella when it started snowing hard and accumulating fast. I swore with great elegance and sat down in a huff and decided to start watching Fringe one after the other and really warmed up to the show. No time travel, but it does have alternative universes colliding. Gotta love that. It's coming back, too.

Terminator: some of these episodes are really poetic, and a complex back story with the renegade T-1000 was bringing something complex together with the future war colliding back in time (more time travel!). Somewhere, it got more relationship-bleak and strained. The bond the characters had in the first season fragmented. Seems as though Fox had to choose between The Dollhouse and Terminator and chose The Dollhouse. See you in the movies.

Dr. Who: I don't know about this new Dr. coming soon. Meanwhile, what a fun show. It always manages a complex back story. Back in small doses over the coming year.

24: redemption, truly, this year to make up for last year's stinker year. Wait, not last year, it was canned last year 'cause of the writer's strike. The year's before last stinker year. A whole bunch of twists as only 24 can do it, though Jack is sort of becoming a caricature of himself (e.g., his dialogue could be spat out by a Bauer-bot). Back next year, if the lead actor stays out of jail.

Torchwood: aka, the naughty Dr. Who. I like Jack. A lot. I think it's coming back as a sort of mini-series.

The Middleman: just a damn fun show. Smart and full of pop-references that zing by me faster than I can catch. Spy-fi funtastic. And cancelled. Boo.

Eureka: another fun show descended from Northern Exposure. But as the outsider becomes integrated, well, not as fun.

Reaper: I think I only watch this for Ray Wise. Plus the fact that I'm a Christian mythology geek. Probably not returning so I'm enjoying the last few episodes as much as I can.

Smallville: my dirty indulgence. I have no idea why I've stuck with this series for so long. It had some early episodes that reached the elegant production values of a high-end stage production (the one where Lex Luthor remembers his infant sibling's death was magic). And it has had it's share of stinker cheese. This year it turned it around somehow and turned interesting. And, if you follow the mythology, I think Clark is about to go on his world-wide walk-about to grow into a man. A Superman. Well, maybe not with Zod appearing at the end.

Heroes: last and on the edge of getting bumped. How badly can you screw up a series? Somehow, all the characters got beat by the Dumb Stick and turned into fumbling idiots. How can you have a show called Heroes where you don't respect any of the heroic characters? Well, Pushing Daisies' cancellation brought back a key Heroes producer, so it might have hope... but it's on the edge of becoming one of my "kitchen" shows to play while doing dishes.

...so, some of those have hit the road. That's a couple hours back in my week. Except for the fact that I still have a lot in the queue to watch... The Dollhouse, True Blood, and Supernatural. Sorry books.