Remembering past New Year's Eves

Before 1990, I stayed home and watched the ball drop on TV. I think there were a few pre-teen years when I went to a friend's house for a sleepover. I didn't drink on New Year's Eve until 1993.

1990: watched fireworks in Johnstown, PA

1991: watched MTV's Top 20 video countdown, then went out to watch fireworks in Johnstown

1992: same as 1992.

1993: went to Pittsburgh and partied with some friends from high school. Got drunk, sobered up, dented Dad's Dodge Omni the next morning when I backed it into another car.

1994: went to a frat party at St. Francis College in Loretto, PA with the same HS friends as the previous year. The party ran out of beer at 12:30 AM after the frat guys used it up in a "beer fight" at midnight. Tried to sleep, failed, drove home sober at 5 AM.

1995: watched movies with some other friends from high school.

1996: low-key party at someone's apartment in DC with recent Georgetown graduates

1997: best NYE party ever with some friends at their house in Arlington. Had a great time and didn't get too drunk. Or I sobered up a little before we left.

1998: I don't remember, which must mean it wasn't that good.

1999: stayed home, drank a $40 bottle of champagne and watched TV waiting for Y2K to happen.

2000: stuck in Starkville, MS because of a blizzard in NY that canceled our original flight home before the holiday and a freak snowstorm in MS that nearly kept us from getting home on New Year's Day. I drove 30 MPH on icy Southern roads to get us to Memphis in time to catch our rescheduled flight home.

2001: had a long dinner at Tio Pepe, a restaurant in our neighborhood.

2002: went to the show at Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village. Had fun for the first 3 hours, but should have left at 12:30 AM instead of sticking around until 2 AM. Those extra drinks did us in.

2003: Stayed home, watched movies.

2004: Went to New Orleans. Had dinner at Commander's Palace, got beer thrown on us in the French Quarter, then we went to a strip club to avoid the crowd.

2005: crazy party on the Upper East Side. Fun for a while, but I should have left shortly after midnight.

2006: same crazy party as 2005, only more crowded. This time we did leave just after midnight.

2007: stayed home, watched TV, cheered on Dick Clark and made fun of Ryan Seacrest

2008: I think we're going out to dinner, then staying home. It's cold and snowy outside.

Geeking out on my holiday vacation

I spent last week in Johnstown, PA, where I could have been blogging, but I chose to relax and spend time with my family instead. (I hope they appreciate the sacrifice on my part.) I had the opportunity to hang out with my mom and my brother and talk about music, computers, cooking, and coffee, among other things. We couldn't make coffee in the morning without discussing whether to use the electric coffeemaker or the French press, or which of the estimated 20 varieties of coffee beans to try that day. I come from a family of coffee addicts, and I admit that I feed my mother's coffee-collecting habit. In fact, her present this year was a gift box of three different varieties of beans from Gorilla Coffee in Brooklyn, my new favorite coffeehouse. On our last day in Johnstown, we did a direct taste-test with the same coffee made in the electric coffeemaker and in the French press. Both were drinkable without milk or sugar, but I thought the French press version had more "notes" to it. There was a extra flavor to the press coffee that the electric seemed to have filtered out. But I don't plan to use my French press more often. My four-cup Mr. Coffee is still more convenient.

My brother and I also managed to break my mom's computer while we were there. We were trying to hook up a spare hard drive internally when the power supply died. Since we couldn't resurrect that computer right away, we hooked up her old Pentium III/Windows 98 PC from 2001 and ran Damn Small Linux on it for a day. Michael called Dell tech support and to our surprise they sent replacement parts and a technician to our house on Christmas Eve to replace the power supply. So we only suffered for a few hours with less than two functioning computers in the house. We never did get the hard drive installed internally; we bought an external HD enclosure and used that instead.

We didn't get to our other long-term back-burner project of getting old files from our childhood Commodore 64 onto modern media. I did some Google searching yesterday on the best way to interface an old Commodore 1541 floppy disk drive to a Windows PC. (Mac would appear to be out of the question entirely.) It would take a hacked-up serial-parallel cable, some special software, and we would have to hope that the 5.25" floppy disks and the 1541 drive still work after 18 years in a hot attic. Given the magnitude of the project, I think that if we ever get around to doing it, we'll have to ship all the old equipment to my dad's house and let him hack away at it. It sound like his kind of project, especially since he's the one who keeps suggesting it. I'm interested in what we have on those old floppies (mostly papers and short stories we wrote as kids) but I think I could live with myself if I never got that data back.

another year, another end-of-year post

Continuing a tradition, it's the end of 2007 and I'm listening to the Classical Countdown on WQXR.com and writing my last blog post for the year. It's been an unusually good year around here. I rode another 1100 miles on my bike, I played some challenging music with NYRO, I upgraded my home entertainment system, and my job stayed mostly the same. I lost a cat in January and got a new one in June. (After six months, the cats are now tolerating each other the way North and South Korea share a border: lots of talk, the occasional skirmish, but mostly coexistence.) I made some new friends on the Internet and had the usual successes and failures in my personal life. Lately there have been more successes: meeting Kate has been one of the best things to happen this year and I hope that our relationship continues to grow stronger. I didn't follow through on last year's resolution to travel more, so I'll reuse that one for 2008.

As usual for me, tonight's plans involve a party, though a much smaller one than I've gone to for the past two years. If you're going out, stay safe, and if you're staying in, what's wrong with you?

See you in 2008!

Busy busy busy...

Work has been kind of crazy for the past few weeks. We've got a couple of projects that are due early next year and so many of us are scrambling to get things done before the holidays. My vacation starts tomorrow (though I'm not going home until Sunday) so I'm trying to get all of my work done by the end of the day. The last thing I want is for someone to call me while I'm at home next week. (I should probably be working instead of blogging....)

Also, it's holiday party season and my schedule has been booked solid with gatherings of one kind or another. Monday night was the office party on Wall Street and I took it easy on my liver, my stomach, and my dancing shoes. I did have a great time enjoying the firm's largess and another year at this job. The evening reminded me that as much as I sometimes complain about work, I know some great people here and I have an extremely generous employer. As for the rest of the week, I have dinner with new friends tonight, as-yet-undetermined birthday plans tomorrow, two parties on Friday night and something else on Saturday evening. And then there's the matter of passing the time on the 7+ hour train ride back to Johnstown. Last year I watched episodes of "Heroes" that I'd downloaded, but this year I don't have any TV series to catch up on. Maybe I'll work my way through some Netflix movies and some podcasts instead.

What I did with my holiday weekend

I handled the roasting of the turkey (my friends brined it for us). I also made cornbread, and we made the gravy a team effort. Thanksgiving dinner was a huge success, even if we ate a bit later than we originally planned.

I made a large batch of homemade granola. It's great with plain yogurt.

I saw Beowulf (not that good, but the 3D was kind of fun) and The Mist (really scary, though Stephen King always does that for me).

I got to spend time with my friends, and endure the Mii-creation process on their Nintendo Wii. They made me a worried Mii.

I watched A LOT of football. Probably way too much.

Happy Thanksgiving Eve!

A year ago tonight, "a couple of beers after work" turned into an eight-hour drinking binge and ended with me brining a turkey and making gravy while completely bombed. I'm still surprised the turkey was edible. This year, I have a cold that, while mild, is going to keep me from getting totally wasted. I'm going to see Beowulf at 10 PM tonight, so I have a hard cutoff for the drinking anyway. Tomorrow morning I will make cornbread, then take an assortment of pans and cooking implements to my friend Greg's place, where I am once again in charge of roasting the turkey. I look forward to an afternoon of watching football and trying to stay out of the tiny kitchen while everyone else works. The rest of my weekend plan involves more football and cooking things like homemade granola and jambalaya from a box. (Hey, don't hassle me: after all the cooking that will go on tomorrow, I will be glad to throw some andouille and rice in a pot and let it simmer.) After this weekend, it's a mad dash through December until Christmas, so this may be my last weekend to be lazy for a while. Oh, who am I kidding? I can always find time to be lazy.

my vacation is off to a great start

I'm at home in Johnstown, PA, this week for the 4th of July. My mother, my brother, and I are all playing in the Johnstown Symphony Orchestra's holiday concert on Wednesday evening. I don't think the three of us have ever played in the same concert before.

I spent Sunday visiting some friends in Pittsburgh that I hadn't seen in a few years. On my way home, my mother and I drove across downtown and I remembered how much I love visiting Pittsburgh. I need to get back there more often. Now that I've seen how easy (and cheap) it is to get there on jetBlue, I'll have to fly in again.

It's been almost a decade since I came home for a visit in a month other than December. I'm sitting on my back porch with my laptop, the sun is out in a clear blue sky, and the temperature is in the 60s. I love the city, but I'm enjoying the hell out of this. I may go for a walk after lunch to see how the old neighborhood looks when it isn't covered in snow.

Pesach Time is Here!

It's Passover, or as I like to think of it, Jewish Thanksgiving. Think about it: both holidays involve a large meal with traditional foods, commemorating historical events. Last night even featured a major sporting event to watch if you cared who won (the NCAA basketball championship game).

Last night my friends and I held our annual seder for the Jews and "Jew-curious" at James & Jess's apartment in Brooklyn. Our seder is a tradition that goes back to 1994 at Georgetown, when we didn't want to go to the official Jewish Student Association celebration, so we had our own and invited all our Gentile friends. We missed a few years when we didn't all live in the same city, but for the past four years we've had the seder. This year the majority of those present were Jewish, which I think is a first. Only one guest was not Jewish, and he's been to our seder before.

Since none of us are particularly devout, our seder combines traditional elements with some innovations of our own. For example, each year I have to Google "seder plate" to find out what goes on it. We didn't have a shank bone this year, so James substituted a giant frozen chicken neck that thawed as the seder went on. We don't have a matzah cover, so we use paper towels. We only have one hagadah, so we pass it around and take turns reading the various blessings and prayers. However, we did have a brisket, matzah ball soup, and three bottles of wine, one of which wasn't kosher for Passover so we drank it before we started the seder. As a result, we got started late, around 8:45 PM, so we didn't get to the meal until 10. By the time we were done eating, we were all sleepy and ready to go home, so we finished the last two cups of wine, welcomed Elijah, and looked forward to next year in Jerusalem in about 10 minutes.

And I've already fallen off the Passover wagon. I had some Life cereal for breakfast this morning, and it's got wheat flour in it. Although seven hours is better than the time in college when I left the seder and went directly to a keg party with green beer for St. Patrick's Day.

what I did on my holiday weekend

I didn't get to see my father, stepmother, or brother over Christmas, so I took Friday off and took the train to Washington, DC, for a quick weekend visit. My dad had warned me on Wednesday that they didn't have electricity at the house because of the bad weather, so he suggested I ask my brother if I could stay there should the power not be back on by the time I arrived. (Regular readers of my escapades may remember my ill-fated vacation to visit my family in September 2003, when I arrived just in time for a hurricane to knock out power for most of a week.) As of Friday afternoon the power was still off at his house. I went straight downtown and met a friend for lunch, then went over to my dad's office and met some of his co-workers who were my co-workers ten years ago when I worked at Georgetown. Then we went home. As we pulled up to the house, we could see that the floodlight in the backyard was on, as were lights in the neighboring houses. When we walked up to the front door, the power went out again. So we went out for dinner. Two hours later, we came back to a still-dark house. We sat in the kitchen with the TV running off a battery and the stovetop burners providing a bit of heat. When the power did come back on around 8:30 PM, we kept the lights off for a few more minutes, not wanting to tempt fate. But except for a few quick hiccups over the next 24 hours, the power was back on for good at that point. My brother didn't get a houseguest after all.

On Saturday I went back downtown to meet some other friends for lunch. When I got back home, my dad and my brother and I discussed home theater systems for the better part of two hours. I'm ready to start upgrading my home audio and video setup to HD and surround sound, so A/V was a big topic all weekend. After much debate and argument, Michael and I decided to go to one of the high-end electronics stores nearby just to look. Well, it was 5:55 PM, and they closed at 6. So we went to Best Buy instead. We left with a few of my questions answered, but added a few new ones to my list. And I knew this already, but it's refreshing to hear a Best Buy blue shirt tell a customer "I'm the only one here, and I don't know anything about this stuff."

I came back to New York on Sunday evening, just in time to get to a friend's apartment to watch "The Amazing Race" and "Grease! You're The One That I Want!" I hadn't intended to watch the second show, but my friends insisted, and I didn't have to work on Monday, so what the hell.

I spent Monday relaxing at home and at the movies, and then at Best Buy in Manhattan looking once more at home theater equipment. One guy shopping for his own system tried to sell me on a Bose system that cost $1000. I'm looking to spend about half that on the audio half of my new system. Besides, I'm not about to take advice from a guy who's spending the money he earned after he got hit by a car. I think I've found the audio system I want to buy, but I'm going to comparison shop at a few other stores first. I'd love to buy something this week and have everything in place before I host an Oscar party this Sunday evening, but that might be pushing it. And I want to do my tax forms first. If I'm getting a refund, I know what I'm spending it on this year.

the last post of 2006

I considered writing a long, month-by-month year-in-review post, but I don't have that kind of time and I don't really think anyone wants to read it. I've got the archives for that. Instead, I'd prefer to reflect on the year that's gone by and think about how I can improve myself in 2007.

I knew going in that getting divorced in 2006 would be a good thing. My marriage had been over for a long time and it was just a matter of my ex-wife and I facing that fact and taking care of business. I don't bear her any ill will after everything that happened, and I hope that she and I can continue to be friends. Being single has turned out to be more fun than I thought. However, I've been seeing someone for a while now, and it's going incredibly well, and I hope that relationship continues to grow. I've got a good feeling about it.

I tried a lot of new things in 2006. I became a karaoke star (at least in my head). I tried to be more spontaneous. I worked up the courage to talk to strange women. I rode over 1000 miles on my bike between April and November. But the best decision I made all year was taking up the viola again. I keep talking about playing the viola because it's done so much for my well-being and it was the most fulfilling thing I did.

My resolution for 2006 was to be more optimistic. I think I kept it. I had my gloomy moments, but then I'd remind myself that I live in an exciting city at an exciting time in my life, and that I have many, many good things and people in my life. My resolution for 2007 is to travel more. I traveled this year, but I stayed on the East Coast the whole time. I'd like to visit friends in Pittsburgh, see my family more often, and get back to Europe. I'm already thinking about a ski trip to Vermont in January or February, so I'll start with that and work my way up to flying overseas again. The bottom line is that this blog needs to hit the road a little more often in 2007.

And that's it. I'm going to a party in a few hours where I will try not to drink to excess and ring in the new year sensibly. Tomorrow, it's 12+ hours of college football. Happy New Year!

back home for a few days

I'm just checking in to let the rest of the world know that I didn't drop off the face of the earth. I've been out of town since Saturday, visiting my mom in Johnstown and now my aunt and uncle and cousins in Reading, PA. I've had Internet access the entire time I've been away, but I didn't have much to share. And clearly I don't have much to say now, either. I've gotten caught up on sleep, reconnected with some friends from high school, and tried to alleviate the boredom of being back in my hometown for a few days.

Johnstown is a weird place to me now. There's a certain level of familiarity with the city: for example, my neighborhood looks exactly the same as it always did, and the streets all go to the same places. But the downtown area has changed significantly and I didn't recognize most of the buildings as we drove down the hill from my neighborhood to downtown. It was still Johnstown, but not a Johnstown I know.

This has also been the first trip home where I didn't feel bad that I could only stay for a few days. In years past I've left to return to New York thinking that I should have stayed longer. I had a much better time at home than I expected, but this year it felt like just long enough to be there. I'm in a hotel in Reading now and I'm ready to go back to New York tomorrow night. I'm looking forward to a long weekend in the city with no major plans. I do have some things in mind to do to occupy those three days, most of them relaxing and low-key.

one holiday down, one to go

I don't feel like recapping my entire weekend in depth this morning, so I'll just mention the highlights:

I prepped the turkey and started making the gravy late Wednesday night after spending most of the evening drinking with some friends. While the gravy was simmering on the stove, I was downstairs at the bar enjoying a few more beers. Maybe it was my state of inebriation, or maybe it was the fact that I used the giblets to make it, but that was the best gravy I've ever had. I could drink it straight. The brined turkey came out juicy and delicious, just as I'd hoped. Thanksgiving dinner was a complete success, and the old and new friends who dined at my apartment thoroughly enjoyed the meal. In the process, I used every single plate and bowl in my set of dishes. I've never seen that happen before.

Saturday night was a "Match Game" marathon viewing party at a friend's apartment. It was a collision of worlds as old friends from Georgetown got reacquainted and met new friends from New York and beyond. I took some of the photos from that night, but I don't remember which ones -- someone else commandeered my camera and got some great snapshots.

I also saw The Departed (finally!) and Casino Royale this weekend. They're both excellent movies, but they could each lose about 15 minutes. I spent nearly six hours in movie theaters this weekend, and I only saw two films.