Happy "New" Year!

I'm about to get ready to go meet friends for dinner, then we're going to go to another friend's place for a New Year's party. I may be in trouble. This party will have some of my deaf friends/interpreter friends in attendance. I've come to find that while no one should drink and drive, I should not drink and sign. (sign language for those of you who don't know me well enough to understand what I meant)

I'm sure if I searched hard enough I would find a mathematical term for the percentage relationship between the number of drinks imbibed by me and my ability to sign or the space I take up when I sign. My friend Raymond loves to tell the tale of the dinner we had at a Mexican place with these great jumbo margaritas. I'll just tell you that I only made it half way through my second margarita because the last half was spilled on the floor as I sent it sailing by hitting it with one of my errant signs. If the klutz in me weren't bad enough, my vocabulary reference speed time gets really long so my grammar sometimes sounds like President Bush complaining that OB/GYN physicians can't practice their love.

Another thing about New Years is considering it as "New". I grew up on the east coast so in USA Terms, we were experiencing the New year first thing. I once called a friend of mine who lived in California at 12:15am Eastern time. She told me that she and her husband were heading to bed (at 9:15 their time) I wondered aloud why they weren't staying up to at least see the new year in and she said "Eh... by the time the new year gets to the west coast, its not so new anymore. It's got fingerprints, dinks, scratches and smudges from the other three time zones"

So I'm heading to my friends party tonight to help celebrate the new year. I'd like to ask my former east coast neighbors to please, handle the new year with care until it reaches the central time zone. I'd like to see it still have a little sparkle on it.

Happy New Year everyone!
Chris