Last day...night...whatever

Tonight is the last night of work for the year. After this I am off until next Wednesday.

Tomorrow will be quite busy. Among the things I want to do is meet with a friend who will be passing through the area. I think I will try to convince him to have lunch at a place two blocks from my house.

Time for bed. Just in case I don't see you before then - have a safe and happy New Year's Eve, and see you next year!

Wind

The wind. The wind. The WIND!

We got a heads-up before leaving work this morning that the wind was pretty fierce. But it took some effort just to get out of the building! My Tercel managed to hold onto the road the whole way home, somehow.

I took a detour on my way here this morning to my house across town, to verify that both my front gate and my Arcosanti bronze windbell were still in place. (They were.) Not that I was concerned that the wind would carry either item away. No, several people in town have been victims of scrap metal thieves who have stolen their wrought iron gates. And if someone is going to go through that sort of trouble for rusty 100-year-old iron, how much more appetizing is a heavy cast-bronze windbell? There's not much I can do to secure the gate, but as of this morning the windbell, a token of appreciation for being in a friend's wedding party seventeen years ago, is safely inside the house.

The wind has died down now, and none of the trees outside have collapsed. Neither has the house itself, nor the utility poles withe electrical wires slung between them. So now I can go to bed.

Back to work for three days

Well, I signed up for overtime for today...and I got it. So it's back to work tonight, and then Tuesday and Wednesday nights too. On Thursday a friend will be passing through the are and I'll want to meet up with him for lunch. Then it's mass sometime in the afternoon, dinner with my mom, and a New Year's Party (I think - I haven't received any recent reminders, so that might have changed.) So Thursday will be a bit of a marathon, and the challenge will be to get some sleep in there somewhere.

Friday, Saturday, and Sunday I may try to do some of the holiday visiting I haven't been doing. But when you have a car with 313,000 miles on it, you do have to be careful about long trips.

I actually don't go back to work after that until Wednesday the 6th, on a new experimental schedule where we'll be working fewer hours spread out over more days - instead of 48 hours every eight days we will work 40 hours every seven days, and instead of a 4-day-on 4-day-off schedule it will be 5 days on, 3 days off, with the first and last days of the 5 day rotation being partial days. It's confusing as hell, but there are very good reasons for trying it. Unfortunately, the practical upshot of commuting 5 days out of every 8 instead of 4 days out of every 8 is that the cost of commuting (as well as associated wear-and-tear) has gone up 25%. It's as if the price of gas went up from $3 a gallon to $3.75 a gallon. And before you suggest that everyone should start car pooling - there are practical considerations that make scheduling carpools impossible on these first and last days. Which means a major disruption for those who already carpool.

I wonder if any new employment opportunities will be coming to this region in the coming year.

As 2009 grinds to a close

Christmas Day is over, though as our priest keeps reminding us, Catholics* observe Christmas all the way through to January 10, which is when we observe the Feast of the Epiphany. I have no problem with leaving my Christmas decorations up until then, and beyond.

It's been a busy past few days, and this is the first time in a while I've really had a chance to sit down and compose at the keyboard. Which is a damned shame, because unless something happens (and it might), I am at the top of the overtime list for tomorrow, so I will most likely be going in to work tomorrow night. I won't know for sure until Monday morning.

I've been laying pretty low this Christmas, shopping-wise. I know that if I leave the house now I will spend some money. Actually I want to spend some money on an Astronomy calendar (or, should I say, the Astronomy calendar.) And maybe a few other things.

2009 hit the rest of the country pretty hard economically. Here in NEPA, not so much - because we've already been in severe economic and employment straits for several years now. (I lost my decently-paying white-collar job back in February 2007, back when folks were still laughing at suggestions of a coming recession.) A friend in the D.C. Metro area tells me that some of her fellow government employees were having a conversation prefaced with the statement "Now that the recession is over..." When she pointed out that the recession is far from over for people in a lot of places outside of their insular little bubble community, they pretty much responded with a sneering "sucks to be them." (For more on this, see this post from Robert Reich.)

I think I'll be doing some blog housekeeping for the new year. There are a few blogs and associated sites that have gone away and are almost certainly not coming back. Pruning these dead sites away is personally painful because at least one of them represents a friend - now a former friend, or maybe a never-really-was-a-friend - who has also gone away and is almost certainly not coming back, at least not anywhere that I will be able to - or welcome to - interact with her.

A new year represents a blank slate on which all our hopes and fears exist only as potentialities that have yet to be actualized. Starting from where we are, I guess it's easy to hope that things will get better, and maybe they will.


*In the most recent local episode of "The Culture Wars", there was a bit of a brouhaha about a manger scene set up on the Luzerne County Courthouse lawn, with a token menorah tossed in for balance. You can read more details about this here. The punch line is, more than a few Catholics were among those talking about how Christianity is a part of our nation's founding tradition and culture. I think if they studied history more closely, they would find that damned dirty Papists were regarded by the Americans of the days of our Founding Fathers about as highly as gay Muslim pedophiles would be in today's culture.

Happy Boxing Day!

One of these days someone will think to program a Rocky marathon on this day.

Been busy...too busy to blog. In a good way, I guess. But in the blogosphere I did help someone solve a mystery these past two days. That's always fun!

...Plus I'm getting reinforcement on why I will never, ever become a landlord. Ever.

Onward to New Year's Eve!

Merry Christmas!

Hooray! It's finally Christmas!

Merry Christmas Eve!

...or Christmas Day, depending on your time zone and when and where you're reading this!

Most Nativity stories omitted the part about the giant cow

An old favorite from 2005. This display is back up again this year, located just off route 309 in Wilkes-Barre, PA.

Accident (the short version)

Two cars collided just a few feet to my left on the commute in to work last night. It kinda scared the crap out of me. I called it in to 911, and was possibly the only person to call it in, as they called me back for more specific information to determine jurisdiction.

I don't know if anyone was hurt, but I can't imagine that everyone came out OK. At the very least, two cars were wrecked just days before Christmas.

Drive safely, everyone.


UPDATE: The slightly longer version, as related on Facebook:

This was a stretch of I-81 that was unusually congested. I assumed it was from construction down the road, but there was none to be seen. So maybe this is due to traffic from a shopping center filtering down onto the highway via the exit we had just passed.

In any event, traffic was crawling along, and continued to crawl along as far as could be seen. Probably a quarter mile of traffic was visible ahead.

BUT there was a mysterious opening in the left lane that no one seemed to be using. I was considering hopping over from my spot in the right lane to the left lane, and then continuing from there. It was just as I was thinking about this when I heard the screeching roar of locked brakes and skidding tires. I couldn't see where it was coming from, but I could tell it was somewhere behind me. Then I saw out of my peripheral vision a car on my left get rear-ended by a car behind it.

It was a pretty violent collision, and one of the cars - I believe it was the one that was struck - wound up spinning around entirely and facing me. I actually thought it was coming right at me at one point, and maybe it was. I managed to move over towards a merging lane, mainly to avoid debris, but secondarily to avoid getting hit by the cars involved.

My guess: two other people had the same thought about getting into the left lane that I did. One of them moved over and stayed around the pace of the rest of the traffic; the other driver decided to accelerate and speed past all the other cars in the right lane. He (or she) obviously didn't consider that someone else might move into the lane in front of him (or her.)

A few seconds later and it might have been me getting rear-ended in nearly-stopped traffic. If it had happened, it would have been on the eighth anniversary of the time a friend and I were rear-ended at a red light by a hit-and-run driver.

Happy Solstice!

Take comfort, my friends. The night won't last forever. The sun shall return.

'Round these parts the worst of Winter tends to come in January and February. So far I believe temperatures have been above average, with a few brief cold snaps. This weekend's snowstorm made some of the roads an icy mess, but what landed on sidewalks was easily brushed away.

There are differences in different countries as to when Winter begins. Some cultures refer to today as "Midwinter's Day", which implies that Winter is half over; but I will argue that weather in mid-February will be much harsher and more wintry than weather in early November, so Winter is not symmetrically balanced on this day. Others declare December 1 to be the start of Winter, which seems more reasonable. Of course, half the world reckons today to be the start (or middle) of Summer! For them this is the longest day of the year.

But wherever you are, have a Happy Solstice!