I was tired and discouraged on New Year’s Eve and even talked about skipping the colgaffneyis events the next day. I went to bed at 10PM and slept for 12 hours.

That made a difference. I went to all five stops (well, the last stop was our own house) and had a great time.

At c_nocturnum‘s (site of the main course) I had a very interesting talk with SS. Like me, in the distant past she had done a lot of International Folk Dancing. In recent years, though I have not done much of this dancing, I had picked up the impression that it was not nearly as popular as in my youth. SS agrees with this, and we talked about why this had happened, coming up with a couple plausible reasons.

Back at our house I had a nice talk with one member who can be rather difficult. Chatting with him is much easier after two drinks (On the four previous stops I was careful not to drink much, being the driver. I made up for it when we got to our house). He was quite impressed by the two illuminated manuscripts that a friend from grad school made for me many years ago. We tried reading them, but with all the medieval abbreviations even figuring out the Latin is non-trivial without specialized training. One of these days (hah!) I will get out my Vulgate Bible to try to match the texts. One is a psalm, the other is either a psalm or part of the Song of Songs.

About 10 PM 3stitches expressed some frustration about getting a readable copy of Robert Monro’s contemporary account of Scottish soldiers in the 30 Years War. I said I had a copy and was willing to lend it to him, and added that I would go down to the basement immediately to fetch it. Hearing this, mia_mcdavid piped up “Let’s go see Glenn’s library!”, and most of the party followed us downstairs. They were really fascinated. It was quite gratifying, and even a little embarrassing. I don’t think I have ever before impressed people so much by any of my material possessions.

New Years is a time for looking back as well as to the future. Yesterday I was thinking about folk dance, from my Carleton and Stanford days, the illuminations by a Stanford friend, and my books, which I have been accumulating all my life. As for the future, yesterday suggests that 2007 will be an interesting and fun year with colgaffneyis. I am looking forward to it.

Today I had to go back to work. I was short of sleep, but made it through the day and even made some progress on my main project, as well as dealing with a few of the special ad hoc tasks that came my way.