Am I the Most Pathetic New Year's Celebrant Out There?
 

After all, here it is, the peak party night of the entire party year, and I'm sitting next to my wife who is also at her computer, eating Sam's Club cream puffs and Trail Mix, reading (and now posting) The Cellar, while the meat for tomorrow's open house chili thaws in the oven...and I'm sober, to top it all off...

I'm sure someone is more pathetic than I am right now...please?

Happy New Year, all!

oh yeah. i got you beat. me and my wife are cleaning. were listening to jazz on npr, sipping white russians, dusting and vacuuming. ill likely be in bed by 10, completely missing the the whole auld lang syne bit. if im still awake after cleaning, ill probably watch lotr extended edition and not even notice when the clock ticks over. but at least my house will be clean. :)

~james

(Al Gores bong bubbles audibly....holds breath...exhales...coughing loudly)

I am pathetic but only in political terms at the moment.

You wanna see my tatoos? (shows knuckles)

Nah...I'll be cleaning, too, because we're having an open house tomorrow, plus, I'm not drinking white russians. Oh, and now we're watching them do the obligatory "famous people who died this year" retrospective on the 10:00 news...

Rho and I watched "L&O" most of tonight. I'll watch Dick Clark, if I don't fall asleep shortly (it's about 11:20p EST here).

I think even more pathetic than your political career, Al, is the fact that you were the funniest thing on Saturday Night Live this past year...sigh.

well, i think weve abandoned cleaning for the night. its 9:20 here and were starting up lotr. nothing special, but it was a busy week and a half or so. its kind of nice just to kick back and have a quiet evening at home. so im gonna go add a shot or two more vodka to my drink and hopefully sleep very peacefully. happy new year everyone, i hope it turns out to be exactly what you want it to be.

~james

I read this thread, watched some of the very fine "Insomniac" television program, went upstairs and made a cup of decaf, came back down here, and, forgetting that I had read new messages only 20 minutes ago, I read this thread again.

Ain't nothin' wrong with it, in my opinion.

New Year's Resolutions
 

Okay, I need some help with these...

What's another word for "extortion"?

How many e's in "paranoia"?

Anyone know a good place online to purchase large quantities of live eels?

Happy New Year to all the Cellar denizens. Glad I found this place, you guys are whacked...

1. arm, badger, bite, blackmail, coercion, compulsion, demand, exaction, force, fraud, leg pulling, oppression, payoff, payola, pressure, protection, racket, rapacity, shake, shakedown, squeeze, stealing, swindle, theft

2. none

3. fuck, i dont know.

~james

Man, Dick Clark's program is fucking lame-o this year. (If you live in the Mountain or Pacific Time Zones, don't even bother.) James inspired me...I'm gonna do some cleaning after the ball drops.

hmmm... dick clark or liv tyler as arwen...

think ill go for the hot elven chick. i, for one, dont mind terribly that they replaced glorfindel.

~james

My NYE celebration:

- Went to see TTT with my dad (5:10PM showtime).
- Consumed Chinese food.
- Acquired icecream on the way home.
- Posted this.

I suspect I'll go to sleep before I can do any really, really exciting celebratory-type things like "MUD", "IRC", or "play some Counterstrike".

Nyah.

Wow...the people on top of the hill about a half mile away from my house just shot off about five minutes worth of Class A fireworks at midnight...obviously they are (1) having more fun than I am, and (2) much more well-financed than I am.

L&O was lame tonight. Adult Swim NYE Bash was excellent, except for the local Comcast insertions on top of whatever Adult Swim was actually doing at Midnight.

We went into Montrose with two other couples for a couple hours last evening. Had some good laughs, played a few rounds of celebrity- dead, Canadian, or wife beater. Most impressive thing was the bar bill, six adults drinking from one to three beverages plus four appetizers 35 dollars american... Montrose House is now on my list o' places. Between the sheets by eleven. sweet.

You watched the three that were on TNT last night? You didn't like that two-parter?

How I spent NYE this year
 

I went to a hotel party with Dagney, and another friend. We talked to other people, some of whom I actually knew, watched slideshows of pictures from last summers Leather Retreat, watched yet another top/bottom auction, counted down starting at eight sonce they forgot to change the channel in time (again), then drank "sparkling wine" (t'werent "Champagne", no matter what they said), then munched shrimp and coild cuts and cakes and cookies until we were stuffed and went home to bed. My arrival time between the sheets: 0320.

Top That!

Brian :3eye:

Brian, I've known you long enough and well enough to know that nobody can Top you ... (*wicked chuckle*)

Oh, well, after we got the kids to bed, my wife was watching some stuff on the Tivo and I was reading Lord of the Rings. (I meant to re-read it before I saw Fellowship of the Ring, but I never got around to it, so here I am starting it after The Two Towers.) Around 11:55 I wandered downstairs to retrieve my XM satellite radio from the kitchen and take it up to the bedroom. By this time my wife had disappeared and the TV was on ABC so I sat down. At about 11:59:15 I yelled upstairs, "You better come on if you want to see it." She answered in the affirmative and showed up about 11:59:51, we watched it, then flipped around to see what the other networks were doing, and then I listened to the radio & read for a bit more and she watched some more Tivo-ized shows.

In case you didn't guess, New Year's Eve is not #1 on my list of fabulous holidays I enjoy celebrating. Thanks to a nasty virus I'm just getting over, I couldn't even have a nice stiff drink (which I'm generally in favor of on any evening, New Year's or not).

They were all old and tired...have been run to death. Time to TNTrot out some newer ones.

Weee!

I spent New Years looking for my cat and cleaning up stuff damaged by the fire. Jenni was playing Mario on her Gameboy Advance. She noticed it was 12:03 and said "happy new year by three minutes." I pulled my save games off the Xbox hard drive and then went to bed.

It occurred to me yesterday that New Year's Day is really quite silly as a holiday. Most holidays have serious meaning to them, but NYD is really just celebrating your odometer reaching 100,000 miles.

Come to think of it, Y2K was like reaching 100,000; 2003 is more like reaching 110,000. Once you've celebrated the big turnover, the little one is even more silly. Given that the calendar is arbitrary, and that in retrospect it could have been set up much better, we're really celebrating nothing here.

It's nice to say that we get to throw away the last 365 days and start over, but a renewal holiday followed by 3 months of winter is wrong. New Year's should really happen around April. Perhaps we can celebrate the fiscal calendar.

In ranking years, for me, 2000 was enjoyable, 2001 was absolutely horrid and 2002 was merely poor. Your life's rankings?

1981 - don't remember much.
1982 - don't remember much.
1983 - don't remember much.
1984 - don't remember much.
1985 - don't remember much.
1986 - don't remember much.
1987 - don't remember much.
1988 - don't remember much.
1989 - relatively shitty.
1990 - relatively shitty.
1991 - relatively shitty.
1992 - relatively shitty.
1993 - relatively shitty.
1994 - relatively shitty.
1995 - real shitty.
1996 - okay.
1997 - okay.
1998 - okay.
1999 - above average.
2000 - okay.
2001 - pretty good.
2002 - pretty good, until the last two months.

We're celebrating time itself -- time well spent or ill-spent. And we're being thankful at being given the gift of even more time. Sure, the date is symbolic, but the time itself isn't. Time is irreplacable and unpauseable. Isn't it only fitting that we celebrate such a precious resource?

I haven't had what I would call a good year since '99. 2000 was alright, but the last 2 have just sucked.

Here's to making this one better...

Ever since 1990-91 (the two year period during which my mother died, I had a major abdominal surgery, lost my livelihood, my son suffered a closed head injury and permanent brain damage, I lost my home to foreclosure and my wife left me while our child was in the hospital for 10 months), my years have been sort of frighteningly well-balanced...lots of horrendous things on one hand with lots of incredibly cool things on the other.

For example, in 2001, I had heart bypass surgery at the age of 45, leaving me off work for two months, but when I was again able to work, I was asked to help start what has become a promising and prosperous new company (after quitting my shithole job of 11 years). This is the most radical good/bad differential, but to some extent most of the last decade has been comparable.

I'm not terribly superstitious per se, but if I was, the major event of New Year's Eve/Day this year would leave me largely waiting for the good thing to come along and balance it out.

Oh well...life is learning, right?

Elspode


(slang catiously prepares to word his post so as not to insult Elspode with his joke)

I am very sorry to hear of your misfortune. You make my life look easy. I have saved the pic from your site and added it to my "life doesnt suk " folder along with this pic as a reminder of how things could be.

I sincerely hope things improve for you and this guy.

Ouch...suddenly, my own past misfortunes seem to be in relative perspective. Thank you for the harsh yet well-meant jerk back into reality!

And don't worry...I do actually have a pretty good sense of humor. When you are as misbegotten as I can be, you need it...

Owie.

Just posting again to mark my fifteen year anniversary on Teh Cellar. Fifteen...fucking...years.

You guys are teh awesome.

backatcha!

as to the title of the thread... no.


We like to take our new years' self portrait/toast/kiss when the clock strikes 9 o'clock... on the east coast, then go to bed.

We were in bed by 11 in Bukhara and listened to the locals passing in cars and on foot to be with their nearest and dearest for midnight. We are sure we heard the sound of houses voices at one point.
Midnight was marked by the sound of fireworks and we fell asleep soon after.
Our travelling companion (we have had one for the first three days of the tour) was our and about at midnight and reported that all partying had died down by 1am.
Happy New Year, by the way!
[emoji898][emoji898]

Sent from my SM-G935F using Tapatalk

No camp out for us this New Years so: Hockey, Letterkenny, and American Vandal followed by some Bernard Cornwell.

I almost won the prize this NYE. I was about to leave my flat at around 7.30pm when I found the lock had seized on my front door and I couldn't get out. Fortunately I remembered I had a pair of mole grips in one of my four tool boxes, so I tried to turn the knob with them. It turned, but didn't open the latch. Shit. Then I thought I would unscrew the fixing on the door frame, but the screws were covered in paint. Ah! I'll hammer a screwdriver into the screw heads so I can turn them. Shit, my sister's got my hammer. Ah! I've got a lump hammer I found in a park bin at work! But no luck bashing off the paint, and back to square one. I was now thinking, how am I going to get a locksmith out on New Year's Eve? Also, it's going to cost me a fortune. Then I tried unscrewing the four screws on the lock itself, but it was still wedged between the catch and the outside lock barrel. Then I remembered I also had a swan neck wrecking bar I'd found in the same park bin, and was finally able to lever off the lock and escape from my flat. And go to the party!

That ain't close to pathetic, that was an adventure and you got a story that people won't mind hearing over again every new years when you get all drunk and reminiscing. :lol:

So you went out and left the door unsecured? I leave my door unlocked every night hoping for a rapist, but (sigh) no luck yet. ;)

I recall a deeply philosophical discussion somewhere on the Cellar about the exact nature of mole grips.

I suppose the underlying proposition was 'I grip, therefore I am'.

Ah yes, the ol' 'Is mole grips hand tools?' event.

I remember it well.:rolleyes:

Yes I suppose it is a good story :) I share the main front door with the flat upstairs, and we both have our own inner doors. I messaged the upstairs neighbours to let them know. All anyone could have nicked was the junk mail in the hallway, and fortunately I live in a pretty safe area as well. I took the lock into work the day after New Year's Day and a workmate fixed it for me, so all's well that ends well.

Excellent, didn't even need new keys. :thumb:

Mole grips? Lump hammer? Swan neck wrecking bar?
By their tools ye shall know them.
Pathetic!

I like mole sauce tho

Must be sum of dat furrin talkin.
Mole grip is just another name for Vice Grip.

Well I used to have a works Stihl MS 260 chainsaw in my kitchen, but I had to give that back.

Prepare one medium sized sustainably harvested mole...

Wow, that must have been one tough roast. :eek:

Hehe.

Stihl makes a smaller one just for that purpose.

The first chainsaw was invented for surgery.

Neat.