A New Year, A New Post

Happy New Year!

It is now 2008. Hard to believe. I was thinking about how I celebrated the New Year about 13 hours ahead of most of my readers and it reminded me of a New Year from eight years ago. As the clock turned us from 1999 to 2000, I remember being in North Carolina watching the celebrations on TV. Since it was the beginning of the new millennium, news networks where giving 24 hour coverage to the event and showing scenes as the new year arrived in each time zone across the world. I think Da was awake and watching somewhere around the approach of midnight in Fiji, but I'm sure I was up by the time the year 2000 arrived in China. Eight years later, I'm ushering in my first New Year's experience in Zhanjiang.

On a note of irony, for all the times I've heard Auld Lang Syne played in China (they seem to have some affinity for it), the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve was not one of them.

In other news, 2008 has already brought some cooler weather to Zhanjiang. When I looked at the temperature inside my house this morning, it was a frigid 64 degrees. The whole build as quickly and cheaply as possible so don't use any insulation idea, perhaps should be revisited. During the daytime, it is often officially colder inside my house than outside in the sun. I think I'm going to head down to Trust-Mart tomorrow afternoon and pick up a small space heater...