Happy New Year

Happy New Year!

2010 is a significant year in the 21st century. It's the first year that we get to shorten by saying "twenty-ten," instead of the cumbersome "two-thousand ten." No one says "twenty 0 nine" or "twenty o eight," always "two thousand nine (or eight)" . . . at least among people that I discuss dates and years with. I'm not quite sure why . . . we say nineteen o eight, and our grandchildren will undoubtedly say "twenty-one o eight, if the human race still exists in 2108. Language, like all living creatures, develops in ways that aren't always logically explained.

I found a new blog the other day, written by Brian Cieslak, a firefighter from Riverside California. I found him while stumping around the Technorati web site, and liked the couple entries I read in his blog, so now I am a tentative follower.

You may have gathered that I'm not much into 'normal' firefighter blogs. There are gazillions of firefighter blogs that say things like, "Timbuktu FD responded to a 4 alarm fire on 999th street at 23:07 . . ." They contain volumes of cool and useful information, but they aren't fun to read. They're turnip green blogs instead of ice cream blogs (see the About Me section in my profile, which isn't really 'about me'). Turnip greens are fine and good and healthful, but I get plenty during the week from the Fire Marshal and the Ministry of Health and the dispatch centre and multitudinous other worthy places . . . and I have to read those, so when it's blog time, I want ice cream. All that to say that if I start detecting turnip greens more than occasionally on Switch 2 Plan B , you won't see my dirty white helmet on the followers' list anymore.

Then there's Virginia Montanez's blog, That's Church. It's highly entertaining, and full of useless information . . . definitely an ice cream blog.

Speaking of Technorati (which I was about two paragraphs ago), I think I finally entered the proper information and got my blog into their system. My "claim" is still "awaiting review" - they have to make sure I'm worthy to be listed in their directories - but at least I'm not getting those "you idiot" messages from them anymore.

I fear I've turned into a superstition basher. Four times yesterday I said, "It looks like we're going to have a perfect December," meaning that we've had no calls. Every time I said it, people gave me a look that meant, "Shut up, idiot! You'll jinx us!" I thought to myself, 'I'm gonna go for broke this time and really test this jinx theory out,' . . . so I said it three times, then once more just before midnight to rub it into the faces of all those roving fire gremlins out there looking for a chance to jinx me. I guess Upsala is so far out in the boonies that even the fire gremlins can't be bothered with us. Alternately, the recession has settled in and traffic levels have dropped to the point that we didn't get our customary holiday vehicle crashes in December. In any case, I believe that this is the first December with no calls since I started 14 years ago.

I just checked the weather report and we've got -35 degree weather coming. Go figure. One mention of milder weather and, wham, we get nailed with the arctic again. I guess the weather gremlins are paying attention, even if the fire gremlins aren't.