happy new year

So it's 2016.  It's going to take me until about April to remember to write that on cheques.  I marked the new year by changing over the calendars, since we still have three despite it being the digital age and the date being permanently displayed on our laptops, tablets and phones.

In the hall hangs a Den Phillips East Coast calendar, a series of black and white shots of traditional working boats, classic yachts and the Essex coastline.  We've had one every year since our Old Gaffer wooden boat sailing days of the 1980s, because we like the pictures.  Almost nothing gets written on the East Coast calendar.  When the Jaguar is booked for a service the Systems Administrator often ritually rings the date, and the odd cricket match gets marked but not reliably enough for me to use it as a clue to the SA's social availability.  I don't like to spoil the surprise by looking at the photos in advance of each month, which limits the calendar's usefulness for planning purposes.

On my desk I have a Zen page a day desk calendar.  A friend gave me one as a joke early in the new year some time in the early 2000s, finding it reduced in Books etc, and I liked it enough that I've bought myself one most years since.  Some of the daily sayings are pithier and more Zen than others.  Today's asks me what I am going to do with my one wild and precious life, which sounds like the sort of thing your careers adviser might ask, only in more dramatic language.  I keep the torn off pages in a box on my desk and use the backs for writing highly cerebral shopping lists.  I was baffled to receive an email from Amazon several weeks ago after I ordered the 2016 calendar, asking me to review it.  I mean, I hadn't opened it.  It was a 2016 desk calendar.  Though that was not as odd as the email asking me to review an Amazon gift token.

The third calender was a gift from my aunt, produced in aid of a Thai temple cats charity and featuring photographs of korats.  It has been installed in the kitchen on top of the ice cream machine, where it can stay except when I want to make ice cream.  I am saving looking at each photo until that month, though I did take a peek at October because that is the month featuring my aunt's cats.  The January 2016 cat is photographed head on sitting bolt upright and looking like a god.

I hope you had a good New Year's Eve.  We watched The Godfather part II, having rewatched part I a few days ago.  With a running time of 202 minutes this is an exercise to be planned carefully in advance.