We decided that the trees could all stay up until next weekend. Who decided, you ask? Me, ViAnne and Heidi, that's who. Katie ignored us and took down her tree on Sunday. The rest of us figured that since it seemed like we just put them up and it's so much work and we like them because they're pretty, they could stay up till after the 6th, which is Epiphany, no matter what the reading says in Church and the 6th is on Wednesday and who can take the tree down on Wednesday, fer cryin out loud? so they have till next weekend.
Which is a relief because I'm too tired to even think about taking it down.
It's always strange when the calendar trips over into January and a new year but it took me four days to even realize that we're in a new decade. Does it really even matter any more? What shall we call the last set of ten years? the aughts? the oots? The decade began with the destruction of the twin towers and it ended with the collapse of the financial industry. What does it all mean?
I, for one, blame both events on politicians.
The towers fell because politicians, whose job it is to know such things, didn't realize that radical Islam was waging war against us. Those wacky jihadists tried for years to get our attention and when nothing small or overseas worked, they hit us in the face. It hurt.
The financial industry fell not because of human greed, which is a constant, always with us human failing but because of idiotic policies which were based on the silly notion that all we had to do was issue a decree to circumvent the laws of economics, which turn out to be as intractable as the laws of nature.
Oh, yeah, politicians spent the last decade trying to make the laws of nature sit up and beg, too. Al Gore lost a presidential election at the beginning of the decade and by the end of it, had made a billion dollars convincing the stupid and the power hungry that the weather we all live in every day is other than what we've experienced. It was a very good decade for Mr. Gore. He lost an election but won an Oscar and a Nobel prize. There's no doubt in my mind that his soul sits on a shelf in Satan's closet.
No, I did not make a New Year's resolution to be less judgmental. Why on earth would I do that? I think Non judgmentalism is a great part of what's wrong with society today. That, and sensitivity. We don't need more sensitivity training, we need the whiners to take de-sensitivity training. This is the world, we all live in it, so suck it up and quit complaining. If hurt feelings are the only thing you have to worry about, you've got it better than 99% of the human race since the beginning of time, chucklehead.
Personally, I had a lot of fun during the oots. Three of my kids went through their teen years and we all survived, intact. The three of them graduated from high school and no one ended up in prison. Josie would have to undergo a complete personality transplant to become a nasty teenager and there's no sign of that happening. There were many fun trips, with all the kids, with some of the kids and without the kids. We managed to remodel the whole house while the boom lasted and now we have to live in it forever to pay it off, but it's a pretty nice house. When the millennium began, we had no cell phones, laptops, ipods or hidef tv's. We had no indoor plumbing either, but that was a glitch. Now we each have a cellphone, Katie has two laptops, I'm the only one in the family who doesn't have an ipod (why the hell not, I want to know) and we have three hidef, widescreen tvs. One is for sports, one is for movies and one is for video games. duh.
The Oots gave us all that great technology plus The Lord of the Rings, Mama Mia, Ricky Gervais, The Time Travelers' Wife (book, not moive), Michael Buble, blogs like
Powerline, ( who, if they couldn't keep Dan Rather honest, helped get him canned) Facebook and Glenn Beck.
When I weigh all that against global warming alarmists, Islamic terrorists, and financial mayhem, I still have to give the decade a big thumbs up.
