Recap

Being a self-professed and totally-accepting-of-myself type-A anal extraordinaire, there should be no surprise from anyone who knows me that my favorite holiday is New Year's. What's not to love about the ending of an old chapter, and then the beginning of a new one? ...about neatly tying up loose ends and packaging the old year into the box labeled "the past?" ...about a pure, clean, unblemished fresh new slate lying before me as I balance precariously up on the very left tip-top of the New Year's calendar on January 1? As much as I love the anticipation of the yet-to-come, I also love the wrap-up of the past year. I'll be the one parked on the sofa watching CNN's montage (to cheesy music) of the big stories from 2008, and I'll even shed tears for parts of it. (For what it's worth, I actually used to grade my years as well, and select songs for them. Haven't done that recently....Maybe I should return to this?)

So bear with me in this completely indulgent post as I reminisce over my past 12 months.

Without hesitation, 2008 will always and forever be to me the year that my country pulled its head out of its ass and finally made an intelligent decision by electing Barack Obama as our president. I've been wishing for this for 8 years, and anticipating it (with a name to my wish) for four years. I can't tell you why I instantaneously felt as strongly as I did in July of 2004, and I fully admit that then, it was purely a gut feeling that I knew he was destined to be my president. However, it ended up that my gut feeling was spot on and was only strengthened as I was able to shore it up with information, learning more about him through the years. This is a man with intelligence and integrity. This is a man of MY generation (I say with pride). This is someone who respects humanity, respects science and has ears to hear. He is the real deal (thank GOD). I wasn't sure exactly when he would become president, but the fact that it happened in 2008 will endear this year to me forever, despite the rest of the crap that happened worldwide.


So other than that obvious, my year-in-a-nutshell consists of the following:

This year I finally went into the field (Fairbanks, Alaska and Cold Lake, Canada) during our aircraft campaign. I am enormously glad I went, and documented some of my personal thoughts on the Discovery Channel science blog. For anyone who's interested, here are my entries. There weren't as many as I would have liked - I was sick for a significant part of my time in Fairbanks (99% sure I had Rubella, oddly enough - a mild but exhausting illness for a middle-aged gal).
here1
here2
here3
and here4.



We added a gorgeous sunroom onto the back of our house.



We had a fantastic vacation this summer in Boston and Maine - were able to see not only my boys play in Fenway, but got to spend time with not-often-seen-friends in the Boston area.



I learned this year that I was able to survive Jamie and Jamie and their beautiful children being located in Austria for the year. It's been hard, and I could not go for longer than a year without them, but I have survived (so far). But hurry home please. I need that honesty and acceptance and pure love from your family. Plus, my kids are a million times happier when their best friends are nearby.


We saw the Counting Crows and Maroon 5 and Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew."
I finished up a year of being PTA president and embarked upon a year of taking it easy in the volunteer department (am loving that, I tell you).

The Red Sox made the playoffs. I saw baseball-boyfriend Mikey play in person a couple of times.

Q and E were busy with soccer and baseball and Odyssey of the Mind and Girl Scouts and piano lessons and African Dance classes and science/math camps and cooking and art classes and Model UN and band and making excellent grades and playing with friends. I could not have imagined kids more fun, more awe-inspiring, more loving, or more all-around wonderful than the ones I ended up with.


As for my blogging life, it's interesting that I have been so consistent for the past several years with my blogging. I wrote 115 posts this year (111 in 2007 and 110 in 2006). October was my heaviest month, with 19 posts (pre-election build-up to be sure) and April and December were my slowest with 4 each (though this one makes 5 for December).


It's not been such a good year for a lot of people I know, though, or for most of the US or world. We have global warming issues to grapple with. We have an economic disaster on hand. There are many people I love who are now without a job. We have wars continuing to rage and the associated deaths of servicemen/women and civilians. Overall, 2008 has not been good to this little blue dot in the universe (from the human perspective, that is). However, since that perspective is the one I hold most dear, I'm going to throw all my wishes into improvement on that front during 2009.

A grade? I'm gonna give the world a C-. Only the election of Barack Obama kept us from failing. For myself personally, this was a B or B+ kind of year.

Year's theme song? What else? I didn't even have to think about it. This is what I played ALL NIGHT LONG on November 4 as I downed a bottle of wine and a bottle of champaign and cried and cried with joy as I emailed several of my friends through the night with cries of "WE'VE GOT PENNSYLVANIA!!!!" and "LOOKS LIKE OHIO!!!" as I told them to hang on and don't give up on VIRGINIA.... What a night to remember.

It goes along with my slogan for 2008:

"It was about f*cking time."