Happy New Year!

And I feel like I've survived a tour of duty in 'Nam. This particular festive season has been pretty liberally festive, and it's not over yet: if I can get through Antonio's birthday lunch on Saturday and then Estelle's party that night, I'll consider myself free to curl up in a ball and sweat alcohol until I feel better.

Hogmanay was splendidly exuberant; the usual suspects were out, about and healthily liquored up, not least your humble correspondent. We wandered along to the Royal Mile to watch the fireworks only to find out that they had been cancelled - the weather earlier had been rather fierce. Still, all was not lost and the crowd were doing fine without any external stimuli. I got to bed about 5 or so, and I still feel like I'm in a different time zone; by the time I was up and dressed on the 1st it was getting dark again. As a result, I couldn't get to sleep for hours last night and when I did I had some extraordinarily odd dreams. About 6 this morning, I glanced woozily at the clock and managed to drift off, only to do the horror movie-style jerk-awake thing: as soon as my eyes had closed I started dreaming that a dog or a cat (or some similar small furry quadruped) was running around my head, growling and yowling.

All very odd...!

Auto-uPdate: my FireWire card arrived on the 31st. It works well; installation didn't even need any drivers and the iPod is now happily docked to its new mothership. It's a little disconcerting to have every CD I own immediately available; I'm spending half the duration of any walks deciding what to listen to before I manage to pick something!