Starting off a year can be a weird thing. We watched the ball drop in New York City via the ABC News Live streaming service. Our Internet flickered out during the night while neighborhood idiots decided to violate local ordinances and set off fireworks on a fairly densely packed street way too close to overhead utility lines.

What have I been doing today? Cleaning house, walking the dog, and trying to find any reporting in the local newspaper. With the retirement of Shelley Terry at The Star Beacon the paper is reduced to having the vast majority of its “local news” written by Warren Dillaway and the rest of the paper being wire copy and ads. Print copies of the paper are getting mighty thin.

Today happened to be a holiday so multiple stores were closed and mail did not run. There really wasn’t anywhere in town for me to go other than the park today. That’ll be different on Tuesday perhaps.