New Year's Eve Reflections

(taken from my Journal)

The last day of the year.
The last year of the decade.

I was remembering this morning how 10 years ago there was all that talk about the millennium bug/Y2K (which, I just discovered, is the title of a movie) and how all the world's computer's were going to crash and it was going to cause a failure of the global banking system. I applaud the computer-geek-opportunists who seized the moment selling "fixes" for the imminent doom. Thousands of people stock-piled food and prepared for power outages, religious organizations were spouting the end of the world. And what happened at midnight? Nothing. Yes, some computers did have the wrong date for all of a few second, minutes, or however long it took to reset the date (I think my parents' home computer reverted to the year 1989), but there were no lasting damages... except perhaps to those folks who invested in special software to "fix" the bug (I don't count the stockpiling of food as a loss since those are items that were eventually useful).

This year there is a lot of talk about the year 2012 being the end of the world. There was even a movie out this year using the year as the title.

I found a great site about 220 reported dates for the End of the World! and here's what it says about 2012:

The Mayan calendar has many divisions of time: months of 20 days, years of 360 days, katun of 7200 days and a baktun of 144,000 days. Their calendar started on 3114-AUG-13 BCE with the birth of Venus. They expected the world to last for exactly 13 baktun cycles. They anticipated the end of the world near the Winter Solstice of 2012.

 There's more about this date there as well, but I found that excerpt to be the most interesting.



More memories...
New Year's Eve was always exciting growing up. I remember it was the one time of year that I accepted nap time in order to stay up late. I remember so many years where we would all get ready and go to the church wide New Year's Eve Party at Ronnie Rex's house. Out of everything I did growing up, this was the biggest annual event I can think of. Everyone was there. Everyone brought food. And everyone brought gifts for a White Elephant exchange. They even had a separate one for the kids! It was the one time of the year where my parents would let us stay up past bed time. We would play games, watch movies, and eat all night long!
A couple years ago when Mr. B & I had a sushi party for New Year's Eve it definitely brought me back to that night. With one exception. At our party we completely forgot to watch the clock because we were so involved in our games... at Ronnie's party everyone was gathered around the TV to watch the ball drop in NYC. And at our party we didn't have a gift exchange... and Little Monster was the only child. Eventually I'd love to have a big house and be able to host parties like that.

Usually, I don't have plans for the last day of the year, but this year... I'm headed to a party at a friends house. I am excited to spend the evening with some good friends and I know there are sure to be laughs.