Today is the penultimate day of 2007. Happily, it falls this year on a Sunday, so everybody gets a quiet day to rest up before gearing up for New Year's Eve, known to bartenders everywhere as "amateur hour."

Hard to believe we're preparing to step into 2008. We've come a long way since we were hoarding canned goods and stocking up on ammo for the Y2K meltdown. The shiny new millennium we inherited when the computers kept running and the world did not in fact tumble into chaos, well, it's not quite so shiny and new anymore.

How has ought-seven treated us (or perhaps we should ask how we've treated it)? Everyone's answer is different, of course. If you got married or had a baby, received a big promotion or enjoyed some other extraordinary success, you'll always remember 2007 as a special year. If you suffered more than the usual number or severity of setbacks, you can't wait to get rid of it.

For the community as a whole, 2007 has been, like most years, a mixed bag. Neither a standout year glowing with one wondrous tiding after another (when was the last one of those again?) nor a particularly dark one marred by a succession of terrible events.

One thing this year has been, without any question, is dry. For all intents and purposes, it stopped raining last spring and hasn't started back up again. We're in better shape than much of the rest of the drought-gripped state, but that's small comfort. The drought is about as un-dramatic as crises get -- no marauding T-Rexes, no rivers of fire, not even wind-driven waves threatening to topple TV news anchors -- but its slow withering progress has colored 2007 throughout the state more than any other single thing.

The drought cast into sharp relief the question of water resources as a factor to be considered in future growth in Orange County. We spent years hammering out a mechanism intended to ensure that population growth wouldn't outstrip available classroom space. With one projection released this year forecasting the population of Chapel Hill to top 81,000 over the next 30 years, with Carolina North on the way and additional development inevitable, we need to give the same sort of long, hard look at how much bigger we can get without putting our supply of water and other resources in jeopardy.

The year also brought important developments in the interminable saga of the county's solid waste. Having failed to come up with a location for a new landfill, the county decided instead to build a solid waste transfer station, a place where our trash would be loaded into trucks and hauled to a landfill somewhere else far away. Last spring the county commissioners announced that the transfer station would be situated on Eubanks Road, where the current landfill is. That decision came as a harsh blow to the residents of the nearby Rogers Road neighborhood, who had been under the impression that after living next to the dump for some 35 years, they would be spared the next generation of trash facilities. They and their supporters refused to accept the decision lying down, and late in the year the commissioners announced that they would re-open the search for another site.

The year to come, presumably, will bring some resolution to that question, among others. Monday night we leave 2007 behind and move into the new year. What sort of year will 2008 be? Fate and circumstance always play some role, of course, but by and large that depends on us.