New Year's Eve 2010

I get a lot of pleasure out of Facebook (too much pleasure, some might say.) I'm one of those people who seeks out connections with other people. However, Facebook has its drawbacks, one of which is that one's postings there disappear so quickly and are seemingly gone forever (although I'm sure the FBI could retrieve them with no trouble at all.) I also really enjoy writing, and have a hard time limiting myself to the small number of characters allotted for status updates, and what have you. I am therefore going to try to do more regular blog posts, and no, that's not a New Year's Resolution™. (I don't believe in them, at least for myself. Daisy the cat, on the other hand, could resolve not to use her claws and my thighs as the means to get her chubby body up onto my lap at the computer. Just a suggestion.)

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, New Year's Eve. We walked to our friends Shel and Vicki's annual potluck/party where there was a whole lot of social networking of the face-to-face kind and connectivity going on. I saw a lot of friends, some of whom I hadn't seen in a l-o-o-o-ng time (like Lenny, with whom I went to alternative high school, and got more stoned than any other time I remember on a field trip to a very much not alternative high school and couldn't stop laughing, due to some killer brownies that Lenny had brought along. And Dan, whom I met for the first time maybe 31 years ago when he picked me up hitch-hiking and explained what a "loss-leader" was in grocery store terms -- funny the things that your brain remembers -- and later was my downstairs neighbor, and became a fellow teacher.) Then there were the friends I see pretty frequently, but always enjoy. It was a quite delightful evening. I love that Shel and Vicki don't feel the need to keep it going until midnight, so that we were home by 10:00 p.m.

At 10:30 I was walking the dog and ran into my neighbors out on the sidewalk with their 5-year old daughter, banging pots and pans with spoons. I stuck my tongue in my cheek and harassed them about noise pollution, to which they replied, "It's midnight!" (wink, wink) Oh yeah … as Terry Pratchett says in Hogfather, you tell children small lies when they're young, so they'll believe the big lies later. I remember those days.

I also saw this sad scene:

Bad Santa -- No more cognac for you!

Back home, I didn't get to bed early as planned, because we watched the movie Gran Torino in its entirety. Aside from the vigilante mentality which is kind of hard to take, it's an excellent movie, and the first I've seen that even acknowledges the existence of the Hmong people.

There you have it -- a play-by-play of my ho-hum life. 2011, here we are.