the places traveled meme

As this is the last day of the calendar year, I judge it finally time to pull out the annual meme that was running through everyone else a couple weeks ago.

Not that anything's happened to me since then. In fact, 2009 has been my least traveled year in a very long time. There were only two out of town trips: a drive to Mythcon, and a trip to Texas and vicinity, part of which was paid for by the institute that had asked me to come and speak.

So here are the cities where I've stayed overnight away from home this year:

Santa Maria, CA
Los Angeles, CA
Commerce, TX
Tyler, TX
Shreveport, LA
Hope, AR
Little Rock, AR

Other state visited: OK, very briefly.

Notable day trips: Monterey once (which I get to almost every year), and Sacramento twice (a place I hadn't been to for years, certainly not for tourist purposes).

I didn't have to go to Potlatch, because it came to me. Had this been a better year, two or three other trips, one to Seattle for Corflu, and one or two to Milwaukee and vicinity, would have eventuated, but those go in the alternate history file.

two things I don't want to hear about today

1) That it's not the end of the decade. Of course it's the end of a decade. It's the end of the decade whose third digit is "0". That's just as legitimate a decade as any enforced by reference to the millennia-ago start of an arbitrary counting system which a) wasn't invented until centuries after its starting point, and b) doesn't even accurately mark the event it's supposed to commemorate.

It's pointless to protest that there was no Year Zero. There was no Year One A.D., either, not at the time. Since all those dates are arbitrarily and retroactively applied, there's no technical reason we couldn't retroactively renumber the B.C.s with a Year Zero in there, if we wanted to. Retroactivity goes on in science all the time. It'd be little more confusing than remembering that the same element has been Wolfram and Tungsten, or that the same fossil has been Zinjanthropus, Australopithecus robustus, and Paranthropus, at various times in its recent history. It's not as if the critter was called any of those things when it lived.

Only we'd need two Years Zero, wouldn't we, one B.C. and one A.D., or else our decades and millennia would have to begin in July instead of January.

2) That it's a "blue moon." The misinterpretation of the term as meaning "second full moon in a calendar month" is an error dating from no earlier than the 1940s, and I never came across it until the 80s or 90s. Second full moons occur every few years, so it's quite at odds with the casual expression, "once in a blue moon," which means "so rarely you should absolutely not count on it" or "not impossible, but effectively never" and certainly not "you can predict it in advance." Once in a great while - so rarely you should absolutely not count on it, and you certainly can't predict it in advance - atmospheric conditions will make the moon actually appear blue.

When that happens, let me know. That's a blue moon; this isn't. Cecil says we should give up and accept the new meaning, but, as with the decade-counting, I prefer to have my usages make sense.

ETA: I also don't want to hear, "Thank goodness the decade's over." Yes, it's been a terrible ten years. But the third digit "0" didn't do this to us. A lot of what's bad now is likely to go on getting worse.