1999.12.31-2000.01.01 - Party At Eddie's!

So it was - the big transition to 2000 - the first even year in a long long time. The big hype started in Australia and France and London, with their celebrations being televised on local broadcast TV throughout the day. And so we went to Eddie's. His house was the one with the lights; the previous year, he was known for tripping the circuit breaker many many times because there were just too many lights; this year, he had rewired the thing to be more power efficient. As a result, the power only croaked once. And sadly, it wasn't at the stroke of midnight, which could have potentially sent people into a frenzy of Y2K-madness...

Here's the view of the house from the street. Ok, so my hands were shaking from having ingested too much caffeine beforehand...

So aside from the lights and all that, the house was huge and rich. Two big screen TVs, a pool room, expensive silk screens and all that. There were a ton of people there that I didn't know. All of Eddie's peoples from Cupertino; people from his high school, friends of friends, and even his sister's friends. And they were all Asian. NOOOOO! Too much AP was present in that place; people were playing some sort of pokemon game on a N64 and getting waaaay into it. I'll withhold the details, lest I end up on an Anti-AP rage here.

From right to left: Ted, Tracy, and Me. MEMEMEMEMEMEMEME! If you look closely, you'll see some AP in the background.

To pass time after watching the Times Square celebration at 9pm, we pulled out this little quaint game called Scruples. Who cares how it worked...the point is that we all got to know a little bit about everyone else, especially Ohad (needs to use skin moisturizer on his hands) and Lee (pjwong) and a bunch of other random people. Nice way to pass the time.

Midnight comes, and we all have these spiffy popper thingies and drink cider (so Eddie hadn't turned 21 yet) and all hell breaks loose. No power outages...nothing. Just a bunch of celebrating and all that. Lots of drinking of cider too. Tracy even brought a few spiffy "millennium" (no comments, bsii; we know already) glasses that looked a little something like this:

Afterward, there was a ton of cider left. No kidding. Apparently, everyone had brought cider or something (but then again, enough people brought so much food that there was a ton left over...hmmm); hell, there were a ton of people there. There was a live band with a drummer named Ted. There were many many Asians. Have I mentioned that before?

Anyhow, in terms of creative ways to finish off the cider, there were people who were grabbing cup after cup, though some of us went the more direct route: straight from the bottle. This provided for some interesting moments as Jeff here downs what was 3/4 of a bottle when he picked it up, while being egged on by the people surrounding him:

Here Eddie, me, Tracy, and Ted can be seen posing with and/or drinking from bottles...yum yum...

Oh yeah - one last thing: the nametags. What's with the nametags that everyone's wearing? Well, Eddie knew that few people would actually know each other, so he mandated these little nametag thingies to facilitate the whole meeting other people process. Or to make the party seem more like a business gathering...I don't know which. It was amusing.

So in the end, it was the start of a new year. No power failures due to computer glitches (bet the people who got all hyped up for Y2K are feeling a bit stupid now, eh?), no bombings on the 1^st of January, and we all live to see another year. The last year of the 20th century and the second millennium.