Happy New Year!

It always pleases me that having celebrated the New Year here, I can sit down and write about it before it happens in Ireland. If I write quickly, anyway. This year, we were at inannajones' Grandmother's house, with kamaitachi and frostious and other family. There was the traditional melted tin divination (all good omens) and then the fireworks. We had the ordinary rockets - which were as cool as ever, including a few neat two stage ones, and one that produced an orange starfield that drifted away downwind, still glowing, for almost ten seconds. And then we had two kinds I haven't seen before - one where it's a box or tube, and after it's lit, it throws up a series of lights one after another, and a little one called a butterfly. The butterflies were the last ones we let off, mainly because nobody was quite sure what they did. As it happened, what they did was whir, take off like a flying saucer to about two metres, and then suddenly light up bright pink and zoom off into the sky. All the new types came from paape, to whom I'm very grateful - I'll be buying some of my own next year. I've seen ads for something called a Thunder King, which sounds excellent.