The Day After the World Didn't End

It's May 22, and the world didn't end yesterday.  It wouldn't have been a good time for the world to end - Sarah is in Germany, and Iain at a Boy Scout outing.  It was not that clear to me exactly when it was supposed to happen (6 p.m. local time or 6 p.m. Pacific Time?), but if it was local time, Tom and Caroline weren't home either - it was just me and the dog.  I think I was sorting laundry.  It wasn't how I'd want to spend my last moments before the world ended.  It would definitely have been a waste of time doing the laundry at all, much less sorting it.

There was an article in the Times on Friday about a family in Maryland.  The parents were convinced that the world was going to end - the mother had quit her job and they had stopped saving for college for their 3 teenage children - and the kids were just embarrassed by the whole thing.  You have to wonder about the people who emptied their savings accounts to buy billboards announcing the world was ending.  What do you do, when it doesn't?

The last time Harold Camping announced the world was ending and it didn't was in 1994.  He said, afterwards, he'd made a mistake in the calculations, but this time he was absolutely certain.  There's been no word from Mr. Camping since yesterday, so we don't know yet what he's going to say this time.  But in the press stories this morning there's puzzlement from the people who believed, and some expressions of sympathy and concern for them from others.  (And of course plenty of material for Jon Stewart and the other late night comedians, as if they needed any more.)

Tom and I had decided, earlier in the day, that if the world was going to end we might as well be drinking champagne, and if it wasn't going to end, well, that was something to celebrate.  So I put a bottle in the fridge during the afternoon, but when we pulled the cork, it was flat and not drinkable.  We'd kept it too long.  So we put another bottle on ice that I thought might be newer and once it was cold, we opened it, and it wasn't drinkable either.  By this point it was well after 9 p.m. (6 p.m. PDT) and the world had not ended.  The third bottle still had some bubbles left, and we all drank to the world not ending.

So here's the take home message, besides not quitting your job and emptying out your savings account when told by an elderly religious broadcaster from Oakland that the world is ending.  We clearly are not celebrating enough.  It should not take the end of the world to open a bottle of champagne.  We'll do better, going forward. 

But now it's time to get dressed, walk the dog, and enjoy the day.  I'm glad we're all still here.  The mockingbirds are queued up to get to the suet feeder at the window, and there's a cardinal on the other feeder.  Bullwinkle's asleep just outside the back door.  A chipmunk just ran across the back yard.  Time to get going for the day.