It's hard to believe that we're ready to turn the calendar to the fourth year of the new millennium already.

Or, if you're one of those sticklers who insisted that the year 2000 was actually the end of the 20th century and not the beginning of the 21st, we're ready for the third year of the new century.

But, as we roll farther into the new century, my wife looked into the past as she set about decorating our home for the holidays.

When my father moved out of his home into a rest home, some of his keepsakes ended up at our house.

Among them are dozens of postcards, sent and received by my grandfather and his bride-to-be about 100 years ago. Those with a Christmas theme ended up on top of our buffet.

Antique holiday art added a festive holiday spirit to that corner of our living room. It was intriguing, as well, to try to decipher the penciled messages on the back of each card. They were the e-mail of their day, and thank goodness they weren't assigned to the burning barrel -- the delete button of its day.

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Also among my grandparents' things are a couple of prized photos, one of an airplane at the Nebraska State Fair, and another photo of my grandfather taking a "ride" on a aerial craft that is obviously fake, piloted by a cigar-smoking man with a derby cocked to one side of his head. I wonder how long that hat would be around once a real LeRhone rotary spun to life.

That was perhaps seven years after the Wrights invented aviation, and the art was just making itself known in Nebraska.

Now, 100 years later, another aerial adventurer has big plans, and it's nice to know that some of us in Southwest Nebraska may have met him.

Steve Fossett, a friend of McCook balloonist John Kugler, plans to fly around the world, in a single-engine jet aircraft designed to be just strong enough to lift him and 18,000 pounds of fuel off the ground.

Fossett, who has visited McCook during balloon events, knows what he is up against. He achieved the first nonstop solo flight around the world in a balloon -- with the help of Kugler in his ground crew -- in 2002, is shooting for a glider altitude record of 62,000 feet and on Nov. 14 in Argentina set a glider distance record of 1,244 miles.

Fossett's friend, Sir Richard Branson of Virgin Atlantic airlines and Virgin Records fame, is his sponsor and backup pilot, and his plane, the Virgin Global Flyer, is being built by Burt Rutan and company, who built the two-engine Voyager, which flew around the world, nonstop and nonrefueled, with two pilots in 1986.

Rutan, by the way, marked the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers' first flight by sending his private space rocket plane, Spaceship One, to Mach 1.2 on Dec. 17, 2003.

You can read more about Fossett's latest adventures in the January 2004 Popular Science or on the Internet at http://www.popsci.com/popsci/aviation/ar...