Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Happy New Year from the Eastern Standard Time zone!

I greet the new year essentially unprepared and at home, but a little better rested than most new years, and this time there's an adorable little killing machine sharing my house and life. (Okay, she's much better at catching than at killing, but her species is "adorable killing machine", right?)

There's much I wanted to get done before the end of New Year's Eve -- printing DayRunner pages for January, printing up pre-numbered index cards for rolls of film exposed in 2004, replacing the sheets and doing the dishes so I'd start the new year with fresh sheets and an empty sink (not important, but one of those symbolic nice touches ... of course as long as I get around to changing the sheets before I go back to bed, if I feel energetic enough to do so, that still counts) -- but I decided that making myself crazy and exhausted was not conducive to getting 2004 off to a good start. Alas, I also didn't get around to making social plans, nor driving to a friend's house to attempt to troubleshoot her Windows machine, but given that I started feeling all crash-y a few hours ago, having made plans only would've left me feeling stressed about not having gotten to wherever at a reasonable time. Well, more stressed, anyhow, since I had a little trouble reminding myself that I'd decided not to stress about Going Out To Do Something Special tonight.

I heard explosions, woke up just enough to think that it might be the fireworks over the harbour, pried myself far enough further awake to see the clock (it was a warm-up shot, but that did mean I was awake enough to catch the actual stroke of midnight even if my eyes weren't very far open), noted the flashes of light through my window coming from more than one direction (somebody is setting off illegal skyrockets a few blocks west and north of here, and they're arching far enough south for some of the flashes to light up the south-facing windows of my house), observed Perrine's reaction to the fireworks (curiosity, attentiveness, attempting to sort out what direction the sounds were coming from) and watch her fly across the bed to get to the window when two other cats started making noise on the fire escape next door (after which she ran upstairs for a better look)), and eventually pulled myself out of bed to go upstairs myself to make sure the wrong-direction fireworks and the shouting were what they appeared to be. I caught some of the Inner Harbor fireworks from the rear window, and watched several low-arching illegal rockets crossing Lombard St. out the front winow. Perrine joined me on the front windowsill, wide-eyed, still trying to pinpoint the source of each noise, alternating between curiosity and fear -- I think the shouting bothered her more than the explosions, but I'm not absolutely certain) while I contemplated how if I wasn't going to be with my human friends or among a huge number of strangers, there are worse ways to start the year than stroking a cat's fuzzy head and being fascinated observing her behaviour. Then I came down to write this, just because I wanted to post something in my journal in the first hour of the year. The fireworks over the harbour ended about halfway through this entry.

Maybe I'll try to be sort of social tomorrow. And/or write more about the year ended and my hopes for the year begun. And if I don't, I'll try not to make myself crazy over it.

In the meantime, I wish all of you a happy 2004.