We made it

It kinda feels like we barely made it, but we did. Got through 2008. It wasn't the best of years, what with various hassles including having to move again and various financial disasters, so I can't say I'm sorry to see it go, but go it did.

We greeted the New Year with cold, a car making funny noises, a cut in income, and no heat. (The latter of which turned out to be a minor problem easily fixed, happily.) So I can only assume it's gonna get better. Hooray!

The picture, by the way, has nothing to do with the rest of this post, it should have gone up a week ago, and doesn't even really relate to the New Year, but I wanted to post it anyway. It's the first-ever picture of Earthrise, as seen by Apollo 8 astronauts on December 24, 1968, 40 years ago this past Christmas Eve. If you want to make the stretch, you could say posting it symbolizes my intent to keep having geek posts in 2009.

Start the year with a little trivia, which actually does have to do with the New Year: Why are the months we just passed through, September through December, named as they are?

Answer: The old Roman calendar started the year on March 25; the idea was the year started with the arrival of spring. Supposedly it was Julius Caesar who changed it to January 1, but a lot of countries later on used the original calendar; some changed as they adopted the Gregorian calendar in the late 1500s but others didn't follow suit until the 1700s.

Why is that relevant? Because those calendars also used the Roman names for several of the months, as we do now. And if the year starts in March, making March the first month of the year, then December is the tenth month - reflected in its prefix "dec," referring to ten, as in "decade."

And so for November (from "novern," nine), October ("octo," eight), and September ("septem," seven). That is, they are so named because they were the seventh through the tenth months of the year.

On a side note, for the second year Jon Swift invited bloggers on his blogroll (plus some selected others) to submit a link to what they thought was their best post of the year. He has put up his compilation of them here. It makes for some really interesting reading.

Yes, I did make a submission. I admit to having had a hard time picking among about a half-dozen of my own finalists, but I finally settled one this one from November. Which I think I chose partly because I didn't want to admit that my best post for the entire year came in January.

I noticed in the course of making my selection that I was preferring those written with passion rather than those that were more analytical. Which is likely why, had it not been written too late to be a submission, the post immediately preceding this one would have been in the running.