Thursday, December 22, 2005

The Christmas Blog

You won't be getting a Christmas card in the mail this year.

Sorry. (Hey! Don't complain or next year you might get this version instead!)

If you have received a Christmas-themed email that directed you to this site, Happy Holidays and enjoy your visit. I have a year-in-review retrospective all set up. Just think, if you enjoy your stay, become one of my loyal readers and you can read posts about my random life occurances several times a week!

Think of this as an abstract of the past year, in which I lead you Christmas Carol-style through the important events and occurrences that made this year the one that it was. Along the way, you'll meet all the major players--me, my wife Lynda, and my kids Sarah and Grace (names that were once changed to protect the innocent have now been exposed).

So, how shall we proceed? Well, lets do it by month, shall we? All righty then.

january

I was mostly stressed with my project that was winding down at the start of the year. Sarah was developing a fascination with Peter Pan's Tigerlily. And we built the first, honest to goodness snowman in our life.

february

During this month I set out to set down goals to accomplish over the next three years. I haven't yet figured out if I accomplished thirty-three percent of the total by the end of this year, but well, I know I got off to a pretty good start. I also got busted for speeding--coming back from a Bible study no less!

march

Now this was an interesting month, but mostly because I had to spend a good week of it in the hospital. I had a weird problem in my intestines and after spending a good part of the day in the emergency room, the doctor decided to operate. You can read a lot of the whole affair here. It was a difficult couple of weeks, both in and out of the hospital, but good friends and good family helped me get through it very quickly. It threw off some of our plans for visiting San Francisco (more on that later).

april

During this month I did a lot of pretty boring stuff, it seems. But Sarah and I did go and see Peter Pan at the Palace Theater (the Kathy Rigby version). It was fun.

may

In May I finished one work project and got started on another. It seemed like it was going to be a very intense and demanding assignment, and much of it was . . . but significant portions never got started this year. None of that was due to any failing of mine, you understand. A management decision was made to halt work on certain parts of the initial assignment until information was received. The fact that this information was NOT received during this calendar year reduced my work significantly. (To say anything more would be to violate my company's Code of Business Ethics . . . and no force on earth can make me do that!)

I continued posting artwork by Sarah during this month. Here is a representative sample with a cool picture at the end.

june

With June came the summertime. And with summertime comes blockbuster movies. Some are good and some are very, VERY bad.

What else happened?

Well, Grace turned two. And therefore, challenges grew as she grew. Two-year-olds are draining, man!

july

As always, July was a busy month. It is bookended with two special birthdays and features another important day in between. This year's July also marked the departure of a good friend.

august

The big news during this month was the trip to San Francisco celebrating our tenth wedding anniversary. I posted several times while we were traveling to, in and around the beautiful city. Rather than tediously provide a link to each post, I suggest that you go to this page for the month of August archive and scroll down to August 17. Read each post, scrolling upward to August 24. Trust me, the writing is so vivid, it's like you were traveling with us! Enjoy the audio posts from the edge of the Pacific Ocean and sepia-toned pictures of the Napa area. Some day we'll go back.

While scrolling around in the August archive, you can read other random stuff that I wrote about that month. Most of it was fairly ordinary, but that's life, right?

september

Many interesting things happened in this month. Most significantly, I suppose, Sarah (then still under the "Ariel" alias) began Kindergarten. In this linked post, you get some reflections of mine on her growing up along with one of her interestingly surreal drawings.

September also means new TV, something that I pay attention to, both because I enjoy it and because my less-TV-watching friends/readers rely upon me to tell them what is good (or so I tell myself). I am providing the link to each of the three posts in the "fall tv preview" series. To make it even more interesting, I wrote my reviews in haiku. So, it's also educational.

I also had fun at the annual company picnic, though this year's Human Foosball team was less successful than the previous year's version.

NOTE: You will probably notice that throughout much of this retrospective (with the exception of August) I don't write much about Lynda and tend to focus more on the girls and myself. Rest assured that Lynda and I are doing fine and enjoying another wonderful year together, but it's not just my own personal megalomania that has kept her the more silent partner in this blog. You see, her work kept her extremely occupied this year--much, MUCH more than any of us hoped. As I write this in December her nightmare is continuing. This has definitely been her most challenging year at her job and she has tried her best to perform all of her varied duties as editor, mother, mentor, and wife to the best of her abilities. Frankly, I don't know how she continues to stand up every day, knowing as I do how little sleep she has gotten over the past four-to-five months in a row. But, she is soldiering on. Please pause a moment to give her your best wishes and renewed hope for a more stress-free 2006.

october

October is, of course, the month for Halloween. Here is the rather long post that encompassed much of what I did on Halloween weekend. In that post you also get to read about the trip to Indianapolis that Lynda, the girls, and I took with Lynda's parents to see a nice Lord of the Rings exhibit.

In other October news, I struggled for a while to find something interesting to write about. (Please don't make that comparison to what you are currently reading.) So, what did I do? I relied on photos and stupid descriptions of those photos. Even if you don't care anything about those photos, you can enjoy some pictures that include the girls.

If you would like to see other photos of the family that were (mostly) taken during the past year, then please visit this link.

november

Nothing incredibly blog-worthy jumps out at me during this month of thanksgiving and preparation. So, I'll just cop-out and provide a link to the entire month's archive. Leave a comment indicating your favorite remembrance from this month's movie reviews, reflections, and random posts.

december

And finally, we reach this month and this moment. There are a few holiday related items that I wrote through the course of this month. This one was intended to be funny. You can also go here and see some videos of the family putting together our Christmas tree.

If you have stuck with me this far, thanks. I hope your year has been as varied and as interesting as has my families. Let's all be grateful that we have the peace, luxury, and opportunity to engage in pointless navel-gazing rather than fight for survival and wonder where our next bit of food will come from.

I hope to be seeing many of you soon, but if I don't get the chance, I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas, a happy New Year and the smooth beginning of another good year to come.

3 comments:

David said...

It just occurred to em that it might seem that I wrote this at work, but I didn't. I have been working on it for several days and only made the post active while at work this afternoon.

Again, I regard my companies Code of Business Ethics very hightly and wouldn't spend several hours doing this at work (but I would spend five minutes clarifying it in a comment.)

Just so we are all clear on that. Feliz Navidad!

Sven Golly said...

I'm seeing multi-media deals springing from this small beginning. A weekly NPR feature called "my random life" for starters; maybe a sitcom (working title "the burbs") following the busy life of a young family transplanted in central swingstate, juggling jobs, growing kids, pop-culture fascinations, dissolute friends, etc.); perversely funny adventures (anyone who can spend "a good part of the day" in the emergency room and "a good week" in the hospital has a generous definition of "good" days and weeks). Or, on second thought, maybe you've found your medium, and this is it. Thanks for posting your random life.

flipper said...

Who is "em"?