As one approaches New Year’s Eve, one might think about the past year and what may happen in the next. I don’t. Instead, I think about how millions of people are partying and having fun drinking and clubbing and how I know I’ll never have fun like that.
I’m not a party person. Seeing television commercials for Girls Gone Wild, MTV Spring Break (not that I watch that channel), or E!s Wild On, or anything about the Playboy Mansion gets me depressed knowing that as you see the people on TV having all kinds of fun, I’ll likely never experience that level of fun, no matter what it is. Sure, you can have fun without going to parties and getting drunk, but I can’t think of anything that would get me as excited as those people seem to be.
I’ll just spend it at home, probably on the computer with the television on, as usual. Fortunately this year, I have digital cable, which means more channel selection. In years past, I had to suffer through either crap reruns of programs I wouldn’t watch the first time around, or live news reports of NYE parties.
The only time I never spent the New Year minute at home was two years ago, where I was on the bow of a research vessel in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, having left the Equator and heading towards port in Tahiti, where we would dock two days later.
Last year, I was close to not being home, having been in Panama the day after Christmas (see last post) and returning home on New Year’s Eve afternoon. Six years ago, I was in Australia with my family, who decided to come back home two days before New Year’s. If you’ve never seen the New Year celebration in Sydney, in Sydney Harbour with the Harbour Bridge fireworks and reflections off the Opera House, you owe it to yourself to see it, at least in pictures.
What would have made it even more special is that was the 2000-2001 celebration, the “true” millennium celebration. Every celebration afterwards would not be the same. And in recent years, they’ve been scaling back the fireworks shows, because as it is the height of summer in the Southern Hemisphere, there is severe fire danger. So much so that even summer barbeques must be limited and carefully monitored.
Where would I like to be next New Year’s Eve? I wouldn’t mind being in Sydney again, where I was able to see the Australia Day celebration back in 2005 (I’ll get those pictures up on Flickr eventually). With my thesis work supposedly finishing up, even though that seems to happen every semester, I would like to find a job elsewhere, out of the country would be preferable, to give me a chance to see somewhere else. It’s kind of hard to do web searches for jobs on other continents, but I may have found a couple of promising descriptions. Hopefully the jobs are still there when I finish and I am the right person for it. I actually don’t have to be completely done with the thesis. If I can find a job, I would think I would be allowed to take it and finish through email correspondence, returning only for instances that require my presence, which should be minimal, if not completely unnecessary. (If you know some good job site links for non-US countries, which I guess is all of them except for one, let me know, but not as a link if possible, or the spam filter might catch it.)
I mentioned before in the Seattle blogs that I didn’t like to use Flickr because of the 20MB limit on free accounts, but if I had done it back in September, I would have gotten at least 4 months of bandwidth by now. I found out on that I could link Flickr photos to this blog, so I went ahead and did it on December 1, meaning I missed an extra 20MB of photos by one day.
Today, I found out the limit on my free account was raised to 100MB. Hopefully that’s permanent, and not just a holiday bonus. In a couple of days, expect a whole bunch more photos. I haven’t found a way to reorganize them into albums or logical groupings, so the the first 18 photos (at the end of the album) are in order, then restarting with the next 75, are selected photos in near-chronological order from the beginning of my Equatorial Pacific research cruise trip, continuing into Tahiti and Australia. There is still my Snapfish album that has near 1000 photos of that entire trip, plus other trips, like the Seattle one. Apparently, invitations are required, so send me your email and I’ll send you the invitation.
So what are you doing for New Year’s? I challenge you to be more boring than me. Leave a comment with what you’re doing this year, what your best one was, what your dream one is, or all three. You can always invite me to your next one.
One City At A Time 