Happy New Year!

by Bryan

15 comments

1 Kryten42 { 01.01.15 at 4:36 am }

Really Steve? 14?! Wow! I am impressed man! 😀 How do you do it? I did 4 years and was exhausted! LOL

Amazing, and well done! I do visit from time to time… I should leave some comments, perhaps somewhat less annoyed than ones I leave here though! 😀 😉

Sincere best wishes for the future to all! 😀

PS Bryan… I already had my gun-nut rant and it’s out of my system, for now. So you won’t get my GORD (Gastro-Oesophageal Reflux Disease) to rise in this thread! Anyway, I have med’s (Pantoprazole)! 😛 LOL

2 JuanitaM { 01.01.15 at 9:31 am }

Happy New Year, Bryan!

Thankfully, we had no explosions this year. A little unusual. At a minimum, there’s always someone setting off firecrackers or the like (not that I missed it). Maybe they were frozen out since we’re having frigid temps in the Blue Ridge this week.

Guns don’t seem to be the noisemaker of choice in this area. Weird in a way, since almost every household has several firearms. Well, we ARE mountain people so what would one expect? 🙂

3 hipparchia { 01.01.15 at 3:48 pm }

russian
german
Spanish
French
Italian
Norwegian
Swedish
afrikaans
welsh
finnish

how many did I miss? yes, I know I could look it up…

4 Bryan { 01.01.15 at 7:43 pm }

Yeah, Kryten, Steve is one of the Archo-bloggers who hand-coded for years.

I noticed the big fall off in noise down here too, Juanita. I think it was cost, especially with ammo because of the NRA paranoia campaign. The prices have soared in the last few years, even for shotgun rounds.

Only two misses, Hipparchia: Dutch vice Norwegian and Korean vice Afrikaans. Afrikaans is a dialect of Dutch. These are the languages of my family and friends.

5 Steve Bates { 01.01.15 at 8:17 pm }

“May you be safe from the idiots who think gravity is just a theory and fire off guns, failing to understand that what goes up will come down.”

One man died in Houston at about midnight when he and his wife stepped out the front door to view the fireworks and instead encountered the falling lead. He received one bullet to the head, fell immediately and died on the spot. She was unharmed, at least physically.

Damn, it angers me! The Nuts Reacting Asininely (NRA) claims they emphasize firearm safety training; if so, where are they when this kind of sh!t happens?

I know I’ve told the story of the New Year’s Eve bullet through my upstairs neighbor’s bedroom window when I was about age 15, but I still haven’t forgotten how vulnerable we all felt that NYE. Gus was pretty cool about it; as an Army vet from W.W.II, he had a good idea how to move to minimize his exposure to further shots. But what an utterly unnecessary waste of lives it all is! The man who fired that shot was witnessed by a kid and caught by the police, but that is bound to be a rare exception.

6 Steve Bates { 01.01.15 at 8:19 pm }

Thanks, folks, for the good wishes on my absurdly long span as a blogger. Fourteen years! Somehow it seems much longer… 😈

7 Bryan { 01.01.15 at 11:23 pm }

I think we had a better than usual year locally, Steve, because there wasn’t much going on last night. I think that a lack of money kept the fireworks and gun fire to a minimum. It happens every year, but people just don’t learn. Making a blank is a very simple thing. With a shotgun shell you uncrimp the end and dump the shot, with regular cartridges you pull out the bullet and put a paper plug in its place. It isn’t brain surgery, but a lot of people who own guns need something done to what few brain cells they have left.

Well, Steve, you have been blogging the entire century 😉

8 Steve Bates { 01.03.15 at 12:54 am }

“Well, Steve, you have been blogging the entire century ;)”

Bryan, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate meeting a man who knows that any century begins with an “xx01” year, not an “xx00” year, because there is no year 0 in the Common Era system. (Buddhist, Hindu and astronomical calendars are not so stupid deficient.)

9 Bryan { 01.03.15 at 8:40 am }

Steve, try studying historical records without knowing that or that English records prior to the 1755 Act of Parliament used the Julian calendar and March 25 was New Year’s day, i.e. the vernal equinox, not a week after the winter solstice. It doesn’t work. What Russian records that exist are a bigger mess date wise because some areas used both calendars and it was a coin toss for dates in January, February, and March.

10 hipparchia { 01.05.15 at 7:14 pm }

ah well, the dutch kids I used to babysit (and who tried to teach me to speak dutch, whenever they weren’t trying to teach me to play the organ) are from when I was about 12 or 13, and the south African neighbors are from when I was about 8 or 10, so I suppose I can forgive myself for that.

the Norwegian (and Danish, and Swedish) friends, otoh. are from my 20s and 30s, so I obviously need to go back and brush up a bit on my Scandinavian languages. 😀

11 Bryan { 01.05.15 at 8:51 pm }

I could have used the Korean characters and put in 새해 복 많이받으세요, but I need to remember how to say it. Most young Nederlanders speak English to annoy their elders rather than Dutch, but I spent a lot of time in Amsterdam so I made the effort.

You did extremely well, so I wouldn’t worry about it.

12 hipparchia { 01.06.15 at 6:43 pm }

“… so I wouldn’t worry about it.”

just so as I didn’t get the Spanish one wrong 😀

13 Bryan { 01.06.15 at 8:07 pm }

I would be in so much trouble if I blew the Spanish, you have no idea. It would be better for me to screw up the Russian as far as the family goes.

14 hipparchia { 01.07.15 at 6:49 pm }

“I would be in so much trouble if I blew the Spanish, you have no idea.”

lol!

I grew up this || far from mexico… and lived in Miami… and lived in Puerto rico… so whenever I screw up, I just say “my other language is Mexican (or Cuban, or Puerto rican).” kind of like those bumper stickers that say “my other car is a broom.” 😈

15 Bryan { 01.07.15 at 7:55 pm }

Well, there are definitely local dialects with every Spanish speaking country having its own flavor. It took me a bit to dump the Castilian lisp when I first attempted to speak to people from this hemisphere. It’s like formal German – Germans understand it, but no one uses it in real life.