New Years Day
“2020” falls quite trippingly off the tongue compared to “2019”, doesn’t it?
And for 2020 I’ve made some resolutions I think I can keep: none.
I find it astounding that we’ve reached a year that’s so distant from 2000. As a youngster, I regarded 2000 as something so far away as to be nearly in the realm of science fiction. Why, in 2000 I’d be (fill in the blank), so old that it was nearly inconceivable.
And now twenty years have passed since 2000.
I’m trying to get a few things organized today that I put off during the holidays. Hope you’re all having a wonderful New Years Day!
“ I find it astounding that we’ve reached a year that’s so distant from 2000.“
Man, ain’t that the truth. I have a vivid memory of sitting in my 6th grade classroom ca. 1960 and doing the arithmetic to see how old I would be in 2000. Inconceivable! 🙂
But what’s most astounding to me today is that the time since 2000 has flown by so very quickly.
Anyway, Happy New Year, Neo and everybody.
I never, ever envisioned being alive in 2020 yet, here I am. In 2001 I had some serious cancer surgery and had two grandsons and prayed that I might live to see them out of high school and this Christmas was spent with them, age 20 and 22 and now I have four more grand children besides them.
November of 1999 I was deer hunting outside of Crawford, Texas a mile from Bush’s Ranch and we were planning to go to town if Bush and then it was challenged which was a Democratic weasel move. That evening while deer hunting I had locked my keys in my SUV and it being dark and more than a mile from help I broke one of the windows to get in the truck and drive out. The next morning I was out before daylight in a lot of mud and muck driving an SUV with a cardboard window held in by silver duck tape. I pulled in for gas at the one Crawford gas station dressed in very muddy camo clothing, gassing up my duck taped vehicle looking like a goober and there were the media trying to get the on the spot quotes from the local rednecks. I declined to speak knowing that anything I said would sound completely stupid because I have a real strong West Texas panhandle accent.
And yet, here we are two decades later, I feel blessed to have made it this far and was talking to my older brother in his mid-80’s about how it feels to be this far along our paths having lived some interesting stories. Now I am off to meet three other friends, including my best friend from kindergarten on who retired from the West Coast and lives less than an hour from me. All four of us were born at the end of WWII and we get together to shoot targets and then go get coffee and talk about the world and we are just glad to be here.
Wow 2020, like perfect vision.
I feel the same way. I remember seeing the movie “2001- A Space Odyssey” when I was in high school. I remember thinking “I’ll probably still be alive in 2001 but I’ll be REALLY OLD!” And now it’s 2020- wow, the time has flown by so fast.
I remember reading “1984” in high school and thinking how far in the future that year would be.
Ha! and now it is how many decades in the past?!
So, yea, it is even harder for me to realize that it is 2020.
I have no way of knowing how many more years I’ll be around, but I like being in 2020. All of my family are healthy and prosperous which is a blessing. Plus, it’s above freezing and sunny which is rare here as a new year begins. Life is good.
I remember reading “1984” in high school and thinking how far in the future that year would be.
charles: I remember reading “How Old Will You Be in 1984?” in high school!
It was a 1969 paperback anthology of selections from high school underground papers. I found it exciting, like I was part of a larger movement, and 1984 seemed faraway but close enough to be ominous.
Husband’s birthday, so a standing rib roast is in the oven and a good bottle of red wine is on the counter.
It’s odd to think that my parents were young children in the Roaring Twenties (1920s), and here I am, one hundred years later, still in pretty good shape “for my age.”
Best wishes to Neo and all who stop by here for a happy 2020.
Further out, for those so inclined, there’s Zager and Evans’ one-hit wonder, also from 1969:
“Zager and Evans — In the Year 2525”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izQB2-Kmiic
Looking at the video now, I’m thinking, my, those young boys are nicely groomed and dressed.
It’s odd to think that my parents were young children in the Roaring Twenties (1920s)…
Kate: My grandmother was a 20s flapper. If you caught her in a good mood, she would go “Boop-boop-de-doop” for you and bat her eyelashes like Betty B.
I remember as a little kid thinking how amazing it was that I was going to be 30 when the year 2000 came around. Seemed beyond comprehension. Now 20 years on it’s more comprehensible but at the same time it still stuns me every now and then how the years have gone by.
And yes i know I’m a young one compared to many here.
In some ways this is always a depressing day for me. We just took all the Christmas lights down so now it will be so dark in the living room tonight and with the holidays over it’s back to the regular world (I really try to check out from the news over the holidays) and yet we are in the middle of the dark season in the north made even darker by the clouds and rain which dominate our weather this time of year. Maybe it’s just me but January and February have always been the worst months.
Huxley ~ Kate, my parents were in college in the 1920’s, they met later as music teacher and high school football coach but they both loved to dance. They embarrassed my sister and a me in the early 1960’s when they were chaparoning a town teen age dance after a football game. Some one put on some old Rag-Time music and my folks in their late 50’s started doing an incredible Charleston to the delight of the rest of the kids.
I took so much of the great stuff in my younger years for granted now I am just glad to be here.
May all go well for us this year.
Decades run over us. How many remember the milkman, the ice truck, coal chutes, the fruit and vegetable man, the old man who sharpened knives and scissors in the back of his truck, the first telephone with three party lines. (Funny how deliveries have returned after 50 years) Then, 60 plus years of change we’d like to regret only because we have no reason to recollect the day to day past.
…my folks in their late 50’s started doing an incredible Charleston to the delight of the rest of the kids.
OldTexan: Those old dances weren’t easy, at least not for me, when I was doing the retro-swing thing in the dotcom era. (Though the Charleston itself wasn’t too bad.)
There are people who can pick up a dance like putting on a funny accent.
The bastards!
I find myself one of an elderly crowd here. I am thunderstruck, it’s 2020. I was born in 1936, married in 1959, and now here I am 83 and married to the same man for 61 years. How did/does that happen? My mind is proud to brag on being 83, my body isn’t. But the mind is still 40, maybe even 50, what happened?
HAPPY NEW YEAR! May we we all meet here again next year.
In 2004, I learned from my father’s elder brother that their parents used to win dance contests, although they quit contending after getting married.
Knowing them only as grey-haired Granny and Grandad, needless to say, I was dumbstruck at the news!
However, since their son (my father) and my mother started going out to weekly round-dancing shindigs after we all left home, maybe there is something to genetics and muscle memory. They were always partial to big band music, which I myself preferred to the music of the sixties.
We have a son who also took up ballroom dancing (mostly swing) after he got out of college.
Life is odd.
“My mariners,
Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
— Ulysses, Tennyson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqEdLO7kpdQ
New Year’s Day is a good time to look back at old predictions – none of which panned out.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/top-5-most-outrageous-2020-doomsday-predictions
In re #4, that was claimed to be the only failure from an otherwise “spot on” list of predictions by Discovery, but I think that’s over-optimistic; some are already here, some are in view, some are still further off — and most were proposed by SF writers in the fifties and sixties, if not sooner:
https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/what-youll-need-to-know-in-2020-that-you-dont-know-now
Creighton smashed Marquette!
In my youth I’d do the math at Thanksgiving, to determine how far away Christmas morning was. It was so far away as to be nearly in the realm of science fiction .
Now, I swear weekly “garbage pick up day” comes every third day!
TODAY’S New Years tip: For those so ancient that they still know HOW to write, but ESPECIALLY write checks to pay bills and such, you’re probably SOOOO old as to be a doddering fool drooling
into your butterscotch pudding, so get out your checkbook(s) and fill in the
“year” part of the date with 2020 on the next 15 checks or so.
That is, if your as susceptible to human nature, and instinct, as I am.
(Been doing this for 20 years or so)
For those of you so young, hip, cool, and woke, that EVERYTHING happens on an electronic screen….Post-it note, or write it with a sharpie under the screen on your “smart” phone, “HEY! 2020!
Don’t worry, unlike my 10 year old “dumb” flip phone, your hand held electronic devices will be obsolete, and replaced, LONG before this graffiti becomes inaccurate!
“The days are long, but the years are short.”
– Gretchen Rubin
Neo – I think you mentioned that you get a Pocket email, but if not, the one that arrived today had this article about how 2020 is the future.
https://waitbutwhy.com/2020/01/its-2020-and-youre-in-the-future.html?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits
I found it interesting, but a little disturbing on some levels – especially about the placement in time of certain things.
Hope all have a wonderful New Year.
2020.
Just like great vision. Mine is more like 20/45.
I understood that Chuck Yeager had great vision, like 15/20.
In 1984 I was 41, and still in 1980 it was hard to believe in 1984 as a year that might actually happen!
Yes, “2020” seems solid and sensible, unlike that flibbertigibbet 2019.
And I hope that everyone here, and all their nearest and dearest (naturally, including the dogs) will enjoy a good 2020. 😀
I understood that Chuck Yeager had great vision, like 15/20.
Tom Grey: I once heard that Ted Williams, the baseball player, could see the seams on a pitched baseball and read the label off a record spinning at 78 rpm.
Apparently those are urban legends.
However, it is a fact that Williams had 20/10 vision — he could see at 20 feet what normal folks could only see at 10.
http://richmondoptometry.blogspot.com/2011/01/myths-and-facts-about-ted-williams.html
Wow! So many folks right around my age, and expressing my thoughts. And, G-D BLESS YOU, RUTH H.
For Neo and all her readers, may 2020 see you and your families go from success to success, joy to joy!
In 1972, when I was 7 years old, my favorite Saturday morning cartoon was Sealab 2020. How unimaginably far away that seemed then!
Well – we just started the New Year with YUUUGE fireworks, didn’t we?