Reading: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis to Daniel. I wasn't sure if he was ready for it but when I re-read the first few chapters to myself, I realized that Lewis has a very engaging, accessible style that works for all ages.

Y2KOK

With the rush of holiday preparations, we never got around to mailing off some Christmas presents to my family in Maine and friends in Virginia and California. We intended to do so the week after Christmas, but then the flu struck and, as Tab said, our shipping department here was closed.

I spent part of yesterday afternoon wrapping the gifts, and Tab packaged them up and shipped them out from UPS today. If all goes well, the folks in Maine and Virginia should receive their packages by Thursday, which is Epiphany and the last day of Christmas. It's kind of fun to track the progress of the packages via UPS's online tracking system. I can find out exactly when the package leaves our UPS depot and when it is delivered along with all the intermediate stops en route.

Well, the first work day of the New Year came and went yesterday with no major computer glitches or disruptions of service, to my knowledge. We had heard that January 3, 2000 was going to be an important benchmark for Y2K because it was the first day of business for Wall Street and most corporations. Aside from a few isolated incidents in the news, Monday was business as usual.

Our own Y2K preparations here were pretty simple. We bought some bottled water a few weeks ago. We always have extra food on hand. Tab did all the laundry on New Year's Eve day, and we filled up the tub with water just in case the water stopped running on January 1.

I remember being far more worried about the Y2K problem two years that I was last month. Back then I periodically cruised the original Y2K newsgroup, comp.software.year-2000. The posters in those days were gleefully predicting TEOTWAWKI (The End of the World as We Know It) and trading tips on where to buy dehydrated foods and camp stoves. I remember one fellow who wrote that he was moving his family out to the remote country somewhere (he refused to say exactly where) and that he would not be telling anyone in his new locale that he used to be a software technician. He sincerely believed that rampaging hordes would be hanging computer scientists and their ilk from the lampposts after TEOTWAWKI.

While I believed most of the posters were overreacting, I still thought then that we'd see major disruptions of service. By the time Dec. 31, 2000 rolled around, however, I'd lost my earlier concern. And everything turned out okay...so far. Out of curiosity, I looked up the c.s.y-2 newsgroup just to see what they were saying this week. There was a lot of rage being vented toward the more vocal prophets of global disaster. Others, the disciples of the doomsayers, were gamely defending their decision to sink their kids' college funds into dehydrated food and bottled water.

I actually had first-hand experience with survivalism long before the term Y2K had entered the public lexicon. In 1978 my father moved my family from suburban New Jersey to rural Maine. He was convinced that the crash of modern American civilization was imminent, and he wanted us to live as independently as possible. He dug a well and started renovating an old schoolhouse for us to live in. He planted a huge garden, started a bee hive, and bought animals to raise for meat. He investigated various hydropower and wind-power alternatives for generating electricity. He subscribed to The Mother Earth News. In short, he was a man obsessed.

Like most of my father's obsessions, however, this one only lasted a few years. He never did finish the schoolhouse. When my parents got divorced ten years later, my mother had to hire someone to finish the work on the building in order to be able to sell it. Dad planted for one season and then lost interest in the garden. The bees never produced honey and soon sickened and died. He had mixed success with the animals: he raised a bull calf (we named it Sport) for beef, lambs (Tiny Tim and Elvis), and a pig (Miss Piggy, of course) for pork, ham, and bacon. None of us kids would eat the meat, however. How can you eat something you've named?

Having seen how much work would go into that way of life, I lost whatever romantic view I may have had of living off the land. Give me my electricity, my computer, my supermarkets! I don't want to turn back the clock.

Curiously, in spite of my history and beliefs, I have a weakness for post-apocalyptic science fiction novels. George R. Stewart's Earth Abides, Walter Miller's A Canticle for Liebowitz, Jean Hegland's Into the Forest, and Stephen King's The Stand (the first half, at least) are among my favorite novels. I like reading about people coping with the end of civilization.

I just don't want to be one of them.

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