Believe it or not, the days are getting longer and the nights shorter. Still, it seems like the nights are still getting darker at this time of year. I wish it would snow so I could see my feet when I go out at night. Being a black cat at night in a snowless January makes me feel quite disembodied sometimes.

The days are getting longer for some of our town hall employees, but not in the way they would like. Some of them, along with their family members, really appear to be going above and beyond what you’d expect. Town Clerk Cindy Simon and her husband, Fuzzy, were spotted during Christmas week leaving the building with a big pillow, which made me wonder whether Cindy had started putting in so many hours that she was sleeping there. Then Dick Sturdevant, whose wife, Marie, is on the building’s Board of Managers, was seen washing the windows of the Alexandria Room in preparation for the New Year’s Eve party.  Dick also pitched in with Chuck and Melissa Pilchard to clean up the kitchen on the day after the party. Afterwards, Dick was heard to say that he obviously has too much time on his hands since he sold his photography business and it’s time to come out of retirement and find a job that has a paycheck.

Besides celebrating the New Year, the partygoers at Edmond Town Hall sang birthday wishes to Ken Bigham, who was 64 on December 31.

Get well wishes to Nina Frankonis’s mother, who tripped exiting the elevator at Edmond Town Hall, and Joe Engleberger, who tumbled arriving at Ginnie Lathrop’s party at the Stony Hill Inn. Both wound up in Danbury Hospital on New Year’s Eve with broken hips.

New Year’s Eve was a lot like the Fourth of July this year as fireworks and sparklers seemed to be fired off from all directions as the clock struck midnight last Friday night. Fireworks are illegal in the state of Connecticut so it was interesting to note that Fire Marshal George Lockwood found some sort of exploding rocket on his roof New Year’s Day.

Bill Brimmer started a new job this week. Aside from being a selectman in Newtown, Bill now is senior vice president and business manager for Manchester, Inc., in Norwalk, an outplacement firm, and will continue to facilitate the monthly Jobseekers Support Group that meets at St Rose School.

If you got a new computer for Christmas and are wondering what you should do with your old 486 and color monitor, consider donating them to Harambee and the Western Connecticut Regional Adult and Continuing Education Program.  The two agencies are collecting working computers so that students from the Even Start Family Literacy Program in Danbury and Harambee’s after school youth program can refurbish them, learning valuable skills in the process. The computers will then be donated to needy Danbury area families. Western Connecticut State University is donating space for two months to house this project. To contribute your old computer, call Mary Maloney at WERACE at 731-8223 or Bill Curtis at Harambee at 748-0230.

I want to wish Barbara Halstead a happy 50th birthday. She celebrated the big day on Thursday this week. Here’s a question for those know-it-all millennialists who insist the millennium doesn’t start until next year: Barbara was born on January 6, 1950 – was she really born in the first half of the 20th century?

George Arfaras of the Newtown Health & Fitness Club reports manic memberships this week due to the New Year and new millennium. Everyone was looking to make their resolution to get in shape a reality. “People were worried they were going to fall apart due to Y2K,” George said this week.

It must have been an exciting week for former Newtown resident Jim Bowers, a Florida State graduate. His beloved Seminoles captured the NCAA national football championship Tuesday night with a 46-29 Sugar Bowl victory in New Orleans.

A small tan dog was loose this week on Pecks Lane and the police called in Dog Warden George Mattegat to chase him down. The dog, who belongs to a resident of Nunnawauk Meadows, proved to be too fast for George. The pooch was chased on foot and in the car all the way up into the woods off Cedar Hill Road. The dog, a small poodle type of dog, has been missing from his home since before Christmas, so if you see him, call George at the dog pound at 426-6900 or the police department. In the meantime, George will be stretching and doing wind sprints.

You won’t have to run very fast to catch up with me next week. I’ll be right here waiting for you, so…

Read me again.