The Arbitrariness of It All

In a few hours, the least populated time zone in the continental US will go berserk for a minute or so as the Earth reaches the same relative position compared with the sun that it was 365 and one fourth days ago. Or maybe one second earlier. Or later. They are adding a second to make up for an accumulated error in the atom clocks. Whoever "they" are. There is no significance whatsoever to any of this and it never ceases to amaze me how much people make over the "new year." We will probably all be asleep when the changeover happens at our house. Our dogs will become frightened when the guns and firecrackers start going off and they will jump in bed with us and whimper and lick our faces. There are worse ways to be awoken that to have your puppies asking you to comfort them.
The most significant thing that happened today was the alignment of Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and the Moon. I guess the Sun comes in there too since it had just set. An observer on the moon would have seen the Sun and the Earth plus Mercury and Jupiter and Venus I guess but we will never be able to prove that. My point is that these recurring curiosities of celestial positionings are remarkable only from certain vantage points and even then. . .they are fleeting and ephemeral and soon forgotten. Sort of like humanity and its pathetic endeavors that seemed to consume our consciousness for the period we now call 2008. Nothing important happened last year other than our stupid election that consumed billions of dollars and took attention away from things that needed it a lot more. The outcome was less bad than it might have been. That is all I can manage to say about it.
The only good thing I personally have to show for myself was the creation of a vacuum tube amplifier from scratch. Using a circuit from a magazine article, I figured out all the engineering of the chassis. I gathered all the specific parts which my business associate paid for, and put them all together and turned it on. It worked and makes beautiful music. Now we are going to try and sell it for more than the pieces cost him; and if we succeed we will make more and sell them. Of all the things I have tried to do, failed to do, succeeded in doing, or dreamed about doing-- this one has turned out the best of all at least looking back over a long time. If you had told me 365 and one fourth days and one second ago that I would be sitting here listening to an aria on a tube amplifier I built at my kitchen table and that I conceived in my own brain, I would have said that was not likely to occur in this universe. But something came into alignment cosmically and electronically, so thank you to the invisible hands that set me spinning on this mortal coil for a little while. And gave me the energy and vision I needed to do something good this year.