Happy New Year

6:05 p.m. New Year's Eve and Wife and I are already in our "jammies" waiting for the Chick Fil-A Bowl to start. It will probably be the only bowl game I watch in its entirety (Auburn is playing).  There are just so many games now and the whole BCS thing has kind of spoiled it for me.  I will not sit and watch football New Year's Day (or Jan 2nd this year) as I used to do. Just doesn't hold my interest.

Wife and I decided we would have a very calm New Year's and NY Eve.  Daughter has a couple of friends here and they are going out and staying elsewhere tonight. Younger Son and some friends have gone to a concert in South Carolina. Some friends had mentioned maybe having a party but they folded and we just didn't have it in us to invite anyone over ourselves. So it's just us, and we're fine with it.

We found a discount theater earlier today, about 20 minutes away, that was showing "Moneyball" and you could not beat the ticket price -- two bucks! We agreed we would remember that theater because, except for during the holidays, we rarely make it to the movies and will often say, "Oh I meant to go see that" after it is already gone. This particular theater, apparently, shows, for a greatly discounted price, films that are between the theater and DVD release. Can't beat that.

Loved the movie, by the way. As I had noted in my last post, it was a favorite book of 2011 and the movie did it justice.  If you are not a baseball fan, however, you might not find it as entertaining as I did.

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Last year on New Year's Eve Wife and I looked at each other and said, "hang on," knowing with a wedding and graduations coming up, it would be an eventful year. We didn't know the half of it. As my dog Ralph said in our family Christmas letter, quoting Wife, a good year but not one I would want to live over again.

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Have you heard about the tiny country of Samoa, near the International Date Line, which decided to move to the OTHER side of the IDL, meaning they had to skip an entire day?  That's right, they went straight from Thursday, Dec. 29th to Saturday, Dec. 31st.

I heard an interview with a Samoan lady who said she was pretty pleased about the whole thing. Since they are neighbors with New Zealand and Australia, with whom they deal heavily in trade and commerce and who have been a day ahead of them for as long as anyone can remember, it's been a source of stress and concern for business people in Samoa for quite some time.

The lady interviewed said that, due to the difference in times with their neighbors, she would sometimes have to go to work on Sunday, "or Monday, which is really Tuesday."

Whoo, that would be enough to confuse me too, Lady. Good for you.