daverea.com

It’s that time again – time to “ring in the new year” and celebrate the kickoff of the next 365 days. There will be champagne, noisemakers, food and silly hats. There will be counting and ball-dropping and kissing. With any luck, it’ll be the last year whose double-consecutive-zeros appear in countless pairs of novelty glasses.

There are plenty of bloggers (among others) out there recapping 2008, and probably an equal number making predictions, listing resolutions or setting goals for 2009. Looking back at past DaveRea.com new year’s posts in close proximity to the last three new-year’s celebrations, it’s interesting to observe just how life has evolved.

In lieu of listing all the ways my life has changed over the last year – there are 12 months’ worth of archives to account for that – I’m curious what you see when you look back on 2008. How were you different the last time you tuned in the Times Square new-year’s broadcast? How do you think you might change between now and the final ten-second countdown to 2010?

First off, I’d like to say a very sincere thank you to the Rochester D&C, our local paper which also maintains blogs for each town in our area. Naturally, I’m a follower of the Pittsford Blog, though I read it using an RSS feed reader. The D&C was kind enough to post a notice to all of us feed-watchers, indicating that the location of the blog (and, thus, the feed) would be moving.

Which brings me to the subject of the post: despite running the town blogs on Blogger since their inception, the D&C has finally brought the operation in-house and migrated to Wordpress. Not that I blame them; I’ve been using Wordpress since 2005!

I guess it’ll just be that many more folks to invite to a Rochester Wordcamp someday!

By pure force of chance this evening, I noticed that the neighborhood where I grew up has had a recent visit from the Google StreetView car. I decided to cruise by the house where I grew up, and my train of thought went something like this…

“Oh, slick – looks like they StreetViewed the old house. Yep, there’s all the neighbors’ cars. Wow – the trees have really grown in. Hey, whoa – they caught some lady walking her dog. Wait a minute… is the dog? HE IS!”

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At first shot, it’s easy to overlook. Then, you punch the little arrow to do the Google equivalent of a double-take. You notice the retractable dog leash in the woman’s hand, and your eyes wander in search of the dog to which it’s connected. And then… Oop… Yes, that’s what it’s doing. At least they were courteous enough to blur out the doggie defecation!

In case you someday forget how to get here, daverea.com is now listed on the blogs page (http://rocwiki.org/Blogs) over at the totally-sweet Rochester Wiki … “The People’s Guide to Rochester”.

If you’re a Rochester blogger and you’re either not-yet-listed, or not-yet a member of RocWiki.org, get over there and sign up! (‘Cause if I ever scrape together enough ambition to host a Rochester WordCamp, you know that’s the first place I’m gonna go…)

From all (one) of us here in the DaveRea.com skunkworks, to all (four or so) of you out there tuning into our little corner of cyberspace, Merry Christmas.

I spent an absolutely delightful Christmas Eve today, cooking and baking and shopping and listening to music with Kelly and Jason. We galavanted about at Wegmans. We listened to the Christmas feed from Slacker Radio and CDs from Robert Rich. We all slept in and ate pancakes for breakfast. We made spaghetti sauce and apple pie and feta-topped portabello mushroom caps. We drank wine and – most importantly – caught up on each others’ lives and our own.

Tomorrow will assuredly be too filled with celebration and family to allow much time for blog posting, so I’ll pass along my well-wishes to you tonight: No matter what or whether you celebrate, I hope you have a wonderful, blessed Christmas day.

After reading about one of Garrett’s recent retail experiences, and having my own longstanding aversion to shopping of any sort around the holidays, I braced for the worst as I ventured out earlier for an experience in seasonal capitalism. What I found surprised me to say the least!

In all, I made fourteen different store visits over the course of three hours, and I didn’t encounter a single unpleasant person – in front of the counters or behind them! Despite the staff being inundated with customers at every stop, every single person at whom I smiled, or with whom I chatted, was a beacon of friendliness. Maybe it’s possible I was an oasis of pleasant-ness among countless grumpy shoppers, but even those around me in long checkout lines and crowded stores had an air of contentment and good will about them.

One super-bright spot on the day’s itinerary was Blueground Jewellers, where – sorry Kelly – I stopped to get my Skagen’s band repaired. Despite having a store full of customers and a phone literally on each ear (a supplier on one, a tardy employee on the other), the jeweler (I wish I’d asked his name!) took the time to tighten my watchband and send me on my way with a warm handshake and a word of thanks for visiting his store, all without charging me a dime!

Things even seemed to work like clockwork on the roads, too – people yielded to each other in all the right ways, didn’t do anything stupid, and even filed neatly – in perfect synchronicity – from opposite sides of intersections onto two-lane roads. So I’m curious: was it just me? Has anyone else had such an experience this year? Or perhaps the opposite? Is there hope yet for Shopping Season 2008?

If, in your recent adventures navigating our sadly transformed pre-holiday world (a world in which, amidst carols extolling the virtues of peace on earth and good will, a noticeable minority seem to be setting new records for callousness and blatant disregard for common decency) you’ve encountered someone who’s rubbed you the wrong way by their actions or their attitude, you’ll probably derive a great deal of satisfaction reading this post over at Vanilla Garlic.

The storm that I mentioned in the last post has moved on toward the New England states, leaving us to wake up this morning to sparse, fluffy snowflakes drifting gently to earth. They instantly reminded me of this year’s first snowfall, which happened to coincide with my unsuccessful reintroduction to night mountain biking…

After about a half-mile of climbing, with my respirations running at least 60 and my heartrate through the roof, I decided to turn back … As he passed, I told the “sweeper” I was heading down, and hung my head as I made my way back to the car…

It was a tough night – probably tougher than I let on when I wrote about it from the warm comfort of my office, a day later. I desperately wanted to hang in there with the group, to get through the ride. And since I hadn’t, now – cruising toward home in my cooshy car while the rest of the group was still out grinning their way up the trail – I just wanted to curl up in a ball.

I turned on the radio, and with no CDs aboard, flipped through the channels looking for something to match my mood. The local pop and classic rock stations offered no solace, but then I reached the preset for 98.9 “The Buzz”, and hit on the perfect cure: Teagan Ward

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