2009...Goodbye to a year and to a decade

10 years ago on this night everyone was concerned about the millennium bug. There were no blogs, Facebook was an album with your face on it and the only twittering that existed was done by birds. Some of my friends still did not have the internet and our own internet connection before we left Australia was dial up.

Mobile phones were used only for taking and receiving calls, instead of planning our lives, surfing the web and telling us where to go, or where we've been.  GPS was only available to the military, TomTom was a drum and everyone referenced their location by Melways and if you lived in either Brisbane or Canberra you just accepted you would get lost as the street layouts defied logic and couldn't be matched to a street directory (or Referdex for Queenslanders).

Digital cameras were still in the hundreds and hundreds of dollars so we all looked for the best "film developing" price and were prepared to wait a couple of days to get our pictures back. If one wanted to pay a bit more, you could get the pictures in an hour but for most of us, the term "instant gratification" was not on our horizon.  And within the previous two years we had only just started to replace our dot matrix printers, confining the messy task of re-inking ribbons to a soon to be forgotten memory, with a thing called a bubble jet.

DH and I and Indiana Cat were on the verge of the next stage of our lives. All our belongings were either in storage or on their way to Seattle. We were living out of suitcases in temporary accommodation in Brisbane and Indiana was boarding at a cattery in Melbourne. Poor little cat - he had no idea that he was soon to be put into an aluminium tube and hurtle through the sky to another country!

2009 has been a year of milestones and the saddest goodbyes. We celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary in January and I reached a 'significant' birthday later in the year. In between those events, DH's father, Cliff, passed away. He was a wonderful kind hearted man and we miss him still. Today would have been his 84th birthday. He used to say," Everyone celebrates MY birthday!"

My own father also died this year and while we weren't close, his passing has not been without  impact.

2003 New Year's Eve, Issaquah, Washington State

This decade has seen Victoria face a long long drought. we have had a couple of New Years where the temperature has hovered at 40 deg.

Water restrictions are a way of life now and a water tank is the best accessory a house can have. We got our tank installed on Christmas Eve and tonight as the decade closes, we are enjoying a heavy downpour of life giving rain.
Wherever you are, our wish for you and us is for health, friendship and happiness that is found in the quiet moments as well as the BIG events. Happy New Year!