Well, it’s been quite the roller-coaster year, hasn’t it? Mainstays of capitalist industry—auto makers, real estate, banks—are collapsing like the garden shed your brother-in-law built for you “at cost”. Retailers just announced the worst sales year in 40 years—neither pre- nor post-holiday discounts-to-the-bone appear to have enticed consumers to pull their wallets out. Latest (November) unemployment figure stands at 6.7%, including 30 colleagues at my last company, who were laid off in October. The Gang of Three actually had to drive cars from Detroit to DC on their second trip to cadge loans out of Congress.
If this isn’t the road to Hell in a handbasket, it certainly is playing one convincingly on TV.
On the other hand, Americans voted resoundingly against the soon-to-be Ancien Régime, and against prejudice and fear, electing a youthful, charismatic black man, who focused his campaign on the issues and concerns we're facing, to take the reins of government. Barack Obama has a herculean task ahead of him, but I believe he and his team are going to bring us a new deal for the 21st Century.
That counts for a lot.
On a personal level it’s also been a very mixed year. I left an impossibly ghastly situation in March, pretty much counting on the Universe to help me with the transition. Through a confluence of almost silly incidents, I found myself interviewing for a job in Seattle on 5 June (six interviews from 0800 to 1800—by the time I left I didn’t have two synapses firing in sequence), being made an offer I couldn’t refuse by 0700 on 6 June, starting on 23 June and moving across country on 18 July.
I found the housing market much tighter in Seattle than DC; complicated by realizing I wouldn’t be able to sell my house with the number of foreclosures and short sales in my neighborhood. I ended up in The Rambler, which is definitely a compromise in standards.
And three weeks after moving in my beautiful tabby cat got away and was killed, leaving me absolutely gutted. I still can’t think of her without crying.
I’m working in the company of the World’s Greatest Expert (although thankfully no longer sharing an office with him), who’s a master of appropriating ideas and promulgating them as his original thought. (You also don’t want to get between him and any free food lying about.)
After leaving my snow shovel behind in Virginia, wouldn’t you know in the past two weeks Seattle has had more snow than it gets in years. And it turns out that municipal ideas of clearing roads is to tamp down the snow so that four-wheel-drive cars and front-wheel-drive cars with chains can make it through. Everyone else is pretty much housebound.
Then there’s the issue of the state-owned liquor store monopoly, which I hadn’t anticipated finding in the progressive Northwest—or anywhere outside the South.
Still, I’m learning a good deal at work and it seems to be reasonably secure in a really insecure economy. I have a new area of the country to explore—as long as it doesn’t snow—and have made new friends.
But I’m definitely burning El Año Viejo tonight to clear the decks for 2009.
Plus—shortly after I moved in to The Rambler in August, my neighbor came over to introduce himself & advise me that he & his wife host a champagne party on New Year’s Eve—and they serve Veuve Clicquot. He came by a couple of days ago to remind me that the party starts at 2330.
It’s as good a way as any to wash away the taste of the old year. Up or down, time to put it behind us.
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