New Year’s Eve

I spent New Year’s Eve with a writer, a painter, and a scientist who studies Petri dishes teeming with various strains of bubonic plague--if she tries to take work home with her men with guns appear and politely suggest she reconsider. Her lab is under the jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security, you see.

And what did the four of us do? We knitted our little heads off and ate, drank, talked, and laughed--a lot.

In my opinion my New Year’s Eve beat the crap out of any New Year’s Eve I might have spent at a club, standing wedged among anonymous honking boozehounds, screeching my lungs out to be heard over nerve-shredding industrial-mix music, and forking over $30+ for the experience and a bottle of “complimentary” plonky, sweet champagne.

The Evening’s Stats:

• Amount of alcohol consumed by me: one dainty sip of champagne
• Amount of alcohol collectively consumed by the others: two bottles of wine and one bottle of champagne (they weren’t driving)
• Words bandied about: hierophant, martinet, pentimento, Heliobactor pylori
• Centimeters of scarf knitted: 11
• Number of times “Oh shit!” was uttered by the painter in regard to her knitting: 16 (approximate)
• Number of amateurish tarot readings carried out: 6
• Number of minutes the painter spent on the phone to Puerto Rico: 39

I left the artist’s apartment at 11:45 PM and drove home on an absolutely deserted I-405--congratulating myself on my timing--and pulled into our driveway just as our pyromaniacal neighbors set off their cache of fireworks.

Perfect.