08's been good to me

unfortunately, i find it difficult to remember my life further back than one month ago. it's a curse, but whenever i try to think about the "year that was," i can't get out of the current context. small stature, small brain, i guess.

in spite of this natural barrier, for the sake of you, dear reader, i will try to bend my mind to the past. and by past, i mean beyond december, because you can read my complaints about that

 month in my last post. 

if you didn't know it, '08 was the year of change.

yep, let that soak in. 

do you hate it when people try to sum up 365 days with one word or phrase? it 

drives me crazy. i can barely classify one day of my life, much less a year. why should this particular time period from january to december have any particular thematic significance over the previous one? why is january the magic dividing line?

rant over. back to year of change. 

i moved to STL. that's a big change. 

new dog. change. 

overplayed carols destroyed my christmas. no change.

convinced a few people in STL to be my friends. change.

hastily demeaned, disrespected, and stonewalled new friends. no change.

started working at home. change.

traveled to asia, twice. change.

helped a friend build his house. change.

finally ended over a decade of living in the same city as cullin. change.

piled into the car with my entire family and drove over 14 hours to san antonio for christmas. no change.

as you can see, the change clearly outweighs the no change. also, there's that whole first african american elected president thing. i guess that puts the stranglehold on it. year of change!

lame blogging aside, it has been a good year. getting to see my family over the holiday reminded me that i'm blessed by them, in spite of our collective weirdness. one thing that has been amazing about getting older for me is that i feel like my parents have become my friends. not completely, of course, but it's refreshing to be adults together. 

also, i'm including some christmas-related pictures below. the one triumph i did have this year was a couple strands of classic ceramic christmas lights. i've been fighting my wife for them since last year. sometimes you get help from unexpected places, in this case, my mother-in-law. shocking.

here's my lame stan's favorite picture that he took this year. it's a picture in a picture. get it?

this christmas, we joined the  rest of 21st century middle class america and purchased a "flat panel tv (don't call it a flatscreen)."

in other '08 trivia, a good friend started a music blog. thom's lazy eye. if you're into bad critiques and self-referential humor, its pretty awesome. i rated my best albums of '08 here. 

end stream of consciousness year in review.

goodbye 2008.