You have my deepest sympathies, even if I haven't had to deal with anything quite as bad. The poster image caught my eye because it's probably the only Mel Brooks comedy I haven't seen. At any rate, right now, I feel the need to say thank you (and what took you so long) to whoever got this board fixed. Happy Three French Hens day.
In my family, New Year's Eve was never as big a deal as New Year's Day. This is likely to be the result of two things: (1) we don't drink, and don't find the antics of those who have had too much to drink particularly amusing, and (2) my maternal grandmother was born on New Year's Day. And so, New Year's Day, while Grandma was alive, was a combination of (a) her birthday party, and (b) an opportunity for those who couldn't exchange presents on Christmas Day, or at the annual Christmas family reunion (also long-gone) to finally do so. Now, my New Year's Day ritual consists of staying away from any TV that could possibly be showing the Rose Parade until after the last rebroadcast is over (the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Association really ought to take a lesson from Disney: parades should last no more than 22 minutes).
The only time we did much on New Year's Eve was 1st night in Honolulu. It was alcohol free and for the price of your button there were unlimited attractions and music and dancing. Also with the button, all of the buses were free. Of course the weather was warm and beautiful so it was just a really great evening for friends and family. We would get a hotel room in Waikiki. Good memories.
For many years, while I was working part-time at the old Costa Mesa Ice Chalet, we had a church group that rented the place every New Year's Eve, and I worked the party. They were nice people, they were celebrating stone cold sober, and they did a lot of their own clean-up. Eventually, I served as acting manager for the event. But eventually, that started to get old, and I started spending New Year's Eve at Disneyland. That continued until one night, on the cusp of 2006 and 2007, when I'd been overconfident about being able to get in, and found DL in full overcrowding lockdown. Except for looking for a place to get dinner in DTD (my Blue Bayou reservation being forfeit), I spent most of the time in DCA (ultimately ending up dining on chicken pesto/Alfredo penne, at the pizza joint in Paradise Pier), and spent nearly all my time retrospecting on how, with my mother an invalid, my Disneyland pass had turned from a boon to a burden: if I went to DL, I was abandoning my mother to go to a place I'd been to literally hundreds of times before, but if I went anyplace else, other than the San Diego Zoo or a Hollywood Bowl concert, before I hit the break-even point on my pass, I would be both spitting on a very expensive birthday present, and handing over my mother's money to a for-profit commercial enterprise without getting full value for it. And it was that night that I decided that unless I hit the break-even point before I was up for renewal, I would be asking for something else for my birthday. And that was how I ended up giving up my pass. Since then, although I'd always been open to reinstating it, it seems like for everything Disney did to make me want to do so, they would do at least two things (e.g., "Pain in the Night") to make me not want to.
Wow! That reminded me of what we used to do in the 80's. We were Campfire leaders and our co-leaders and best friends were also non-drinkers. We started hosting a New Year's Eve all-nighter for the kids (ages ranging 2-12). We would put out a spread of hours devoirs and had games and made a big impression with my father's new VCR and renting Superman!!!! (A real treat in 1981.) After our older kids aged out of Campfire; we did the same thing at our church for a few years. Parents got off with really cheap all night babysitting (we charged $5 to cover the cost of food). We were told we could have charged like $100. We just wanted the kids to have a place to be safe and have fun. (We had fun too.)
The aforementioned rink rental was a combination skating and broomball party. Thankfully, not both at the same time. The hardest part of the whole evening was getting my less-experienced colleagues to pick up a broom and a lobby-box, and make appropriate sweeping motions. And that in itself brings back memories: you haven't lived until you've tried to sweep up sunflower seed hulls on a soggy rubber floor. So at one point, I spoke with the manager, and he agreed to issue a directive to the vending machine company: no more in-shell sunflower seeds in the vending machines. They could sell shelled sunflower kernels, but nothing with hulls. And the vending machine company agreed, which made life much easier for the lowly "service supervisors" trying to run a clean session.
Sorry for the delay. LP is working on some technology changes to make things more stable around here.
If one of us had mentioned to the LP management that the board was down when we first noticed, maybe it wouldn't have been down all week: it was back up within an hour of my mentioning it this morning.
