Okay, now that 2001 is finally here, perhaps we can stop arguing about whether the millenium started with 2000 or 2001. It's here now, no matter what.

I had grand intentions of doing a year-end entry yesterday, but I ended up spending the day vomiting instead. Joy. I went to bed Saturday night feeling a touch queasy, but figured it was just a little indigestion that would take care of itself in the usual manner in a few hours. However, at 2am I woke up feeling bad and over the next several hours lost every speck of anything that was in any portion of my digestive tract. Top and bottom. I highly doubt it was food poisoning, since I was with my mom pretty much all of Saturday and we ate pretty much the same things all day, so it must have been some awful bug going around. Luckily it turned out to be the 24-hour variety, but I did spend most of Sunday curled up on the couch practicing my moaning. (When I wasn't in the bathroom asking god to just please kill me and get it over with, that is.) I was worried for a while that I was going to have to go to the ER and get an IV, since I wasn't able to keep any liquids in my system and was getting concerned about dehydrating. However, Mom brought over some herbal tea that managed to calm my stomach enough that I was able to keep it down for my poor body to absorb some moisture. She's pretty useful, Mom is.

However, I did manage to drag my non-solid-food-eating carcass to work this morning, and fortunately it was a very slow day with barely any calls. Also fortunately, I took my 8 hour day today and got home at 2pm, at which time I changed into comfy clothes and crashed for a nap on the couch for several hours.

In other news, the Saints managed to win their first playoff game. (Before Saturday, the Saints had the dubious distinction of being the only NFL team to have never won a playoff game. This was their 5th trip to the playoffs.) Mom and I went to the game, of course, and if anyone was watching the game on TV, we've been told by several people that we were on TV briefly in a crowd shot. I'm not sure exactly when in the game it was, but apparently it was a long enough shot that a variety of people saw and recognized us. At least two people on my team saw me, my sister called to say she saw us, and Mom had people come up to her in church to say, "We saw you on TV!" There goes my 2.4 seconds of fame.

So even though the Saints won, they managed to make it close enough that I about had heart failure on 12 different occasions. And ye flipping gods, the Superdome was loud. In the newspaper the next day they said that when the Rams guy fumbled the punt return at the end and the Saints guy recovered it, the decibel level in the dome reached 104. I know my ears were ringing when I left, and my throat was a tad hoarse.

The weather has turned cold here in the past few weeks, which in a way I welcome since I'm hoping it will reduce the tick population come summer. We haven't had a hard freeze down here in about 5 years, and the ticks have been horrendous and numerous. It has dipped below freezing several times lately (and will do so again tonight) which also prompted the adventure of me crawling under my house to wrap pipes that were left unwrapped the last time I had pipes repaired. The cold weather also prompted a trip to the Army surplus store to buy more long-johns for wearing under my uniform. Between the longies, my sweater, my coat, and the brown ear-muffs that my Lieutenant gave to me as something of a joke, I have managed to not freeze to death as of yet.

And my Christmas was fairly pleasant, though mostly uneventful. I worked Christmas eve--getting off at 6am on Christmas day--grabbed a few hours of sleep and then went and worked a detail at Walmart from noon to 6pm. Walmart was closed, so all I had to do was sit in my police car in the parking lot and watch people drive up to the front door and peer at the sign that said, "We're closed, we'll be open again at 6am on December 26th." But one woman peered at the sign for a while, then had to drive up to me and ask me (perhaps hoping that the sign was actually placed there by malicious pranksters and that Walmart was really open, and that the empty parking lot meant nothing) whether they were open or not and then when they were going to open. Some people are too stupid to breed.

But Mom and I had our little gift exchange in the evening, and then I went over to the house of one of my teammates to have a drink or two and basically shoot the shit. All in all nowhere near as depressing as I'd anticipated this Christmas to be, expecially since it was the first one without Dad. The consideration of a variety of friends (and even a very pleasant phone call from my ex) made me feel pretty glad to be alive and all that stuff.