Happy New Year 2017, Humanity!

Your author. Hard at work unraveling the mysteries of Time Space, Pre-Flood human civilization, ancient human technologies, and Mariah Carey's New Year's Eve performance.

To those of us using the Gregorian Calendar, 2016 recently passed away quietly in its sleep while 2017 was born in a small room down the hall. And from the sounds of it, 2017 has a healthy set of lungs. God help us all.

Where I live in Upstate New York (damn right you capitalize that) it also means winter is done running warm-up laps and is starting to hit its stride for a long run. Many of my fellow Upstaters love this time of year. The waking cries of snowmobiles are carried on crisp air. Handlers examine, spray, tighten, and adjust sleepy motors to coax their memories of joyous sprints across untouched snow. The gods stare in awe as their lightning is pushed it into constructs of metal and dripping hoses blasting cloudless snow onto mountain sides by us fleeting mortals.

I am not a member of that venerated fraternity.

I look forward to the ebbing cold and the stretching daylight. The yawns of Spring and the exhausted, failing breath of Winter call to me. The straining seed and green blade speak my name. Come March, my riding lawn mower paces restlessly in the shed eager for the sharpening of its blades and the running charge against weeds. Pale skin, cadaverous in pallor, longs for the burning kiss of Sol.

Translation: Happy New Year everyone! To all my readers in the USA and around the World, I wish you a pleasantly uneventful 2017. May peace and health and prosperity fall upon you in great abundance.

Be seeing you,
Sam

p.s. 76 days until spring in the Northern Hemisphere!