New Year’s Eve

Today is New Year’s Eve. 2008 is mostly in the rearview mirror at this point. I hope you were able to make good use of the year because we will not be able to get it back. Who would want to anyway? The opportunity to accomplish that all important, life changing task or objective is almost past.

It seems like just yesterday that the world was abuzz with Y2K. I’m sure you remember that. Can you believe that was nine years ago? This television conversion process from analog to digital sort of stirs my memories of the Y2K uproar. I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of being reminded that all my cable attached televisions will not have a problem on the “the day”. If the television stations are paid for all this air time to annoy the public, they are probably raking in a tidy sum. With that said, there will probably be someone with an antenna connected television that will not have any idea what is going on when their TV quits working. “The stupid thing was working fine yesterday.” Face it, some people don’t pay attention. Jeff, my son that used to work at Walmart, said that some people complained about those converters they bought. “I hooked it up to my new flat screen, HD TV and it doesn’t work.” He can tell stories you wouldn’t believe. I hope I can get him to write some of them down.

I just ran across my Christmas List from a few days ago. I didn’t get everything on my list. Now that was a surprise. I’m not sure anyone even saw it, but it doesn’t matter. It was all just stuff. You know that most, if not all of the stuff that we hold dear will eventually end up in a landfill somewhere. The truly important things in life are the memories. This Christmas has been unique. It won’t be remembered like we had thought, but it has been unique, none the less. We had great plans. We planned to spend the Christmas holiday in Northwest Arkansas visiting with relatives. We did that. We stayed at mom and dad’s house while they are vacationing. We painted their living room and dining room, like we planned. By the way, it looks great. Unfortunately, the flu bug arrived two days after Christmas as we were putting things back in place in the living room on Saturday night, and we are still here.

We had planned to be in Florida today, but those plans have been put on hold. Fran is getting better, but has no desire to travel that far after just emerging from the flu. New Year’s Day on the beach will have to wait for another time. I’m hoping she will feel better today so that we can still enjoy the New Year’s Day holiday.

After a long absence, it appears that perhaps Arkansas Razorback Basketball has returned to Bud Walton Arena. Last night’s game sold out before three o’clock yesterday, and judging from last night’s performance, Razorback Basketball tickets just got more valuable and hard to come by. Jeff and John got to see the Razorbacks defeat the fourth ranked Sooners last night as a part of that sell out crowd. I’m sure they will have exciting accounts of the game to tell, more of those memories.

Today is my mom’s birthday. I won’t disclose her age, but as the song says, “She is old enough to know better, but still too young to care.” She is enjoying one of my favorite places, the Gulf Coast of Florida. Our plans for a New Year’s Day on the beach started when I told her I was going to take off from work on her birthday and come to see her. She said she would be in Florida, but I was welcome to come. We still look forward to it, but it will have to be another time.

Happy Birthday Mom! I love you!