My wife found this article today on the possible end of the TV series "24" after the next season (season 8). Nothing really earth-shaking here, but it sort of ties in with a thought I’ve had for a while and hadn’t gotten around to blogging, until now.

The thought is, what actor(s) would you want to see play the lead role on "24"? Either as a replacement for Kiefer Sutherland, or perhaps if there were a spinoff or whatever. What actor or actors could fill a Jack Bauer-esque role?

I have a few ideas, mostly dredged from the rosters of other TV shows because bringing in a movie star would, I think, mostly overwhelm the rest of the show. (Of course, that’s what they did with Kiefer, and look how that’s turned out…)

• Christopher Meloni, from "Law & Order: SVU"
• Mark-Paul Gosselaar, from "Saved by the Bell" and "NYPD Blue"
• Mekhi Phifer, from "ER"

Of course, there’s nothing stopping you from nominating a female actor for the show, either. After much thought my own picks would be Michelle Forbes (who ironically had a guest starring role on "24" during the second season) and Angela Bassett (based on what I’ve tangentially seen of her on "ER").

But then again, "24" is a big show, so bringing in a big (movie) star might be the way to go after all. I’m not sure I could pick one, though… I keep thinking Keanu Reeves (basically the role he played in "Speed") would be a good pick…

Finally caught up with my 2008 year in review! You can read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5 if you haven’t already.

November

November was really a pretty uneventful month. The kids were in school, I was entering my third month of my new job and we were all getting back into the swing of things.

I hit up the annual Deschutes Brewery Garage Sale and walked away with a couple of T-shirts, and a case of the 2008 Abyss.

We had a nice Thanksgiving at our house, and even though I had cooking chores it was the easiest Thanksgiving meal I’ve prepared in recent memory. It was a fully traditional dinner, with turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, candied yams, and so on; everything just clicked I guess, and I wasn’t running around like a chicken with my head cut off trying to get everything done.

Which is a nice was to start a long holiday weekend.

December

The month started out right, by getting a new computer to replace our old, slowly dying one. It was a really good Black Friday deal from Dell, and so far I’m liking it just fine.

The first Saturday we went downtown to watch the Bend Christmas Parade, and like Halloween, this was the warmest Christmas Parade day we’ve had in a long time; I believe it reached 60 degrees or something wild like that.

Our company Christmas party was the best such party I’ve experienced in years—have I said already that Smart Solutions is a good company to work for?—and I walked away with a new Blu-Ray player as a raffle prize. No, I’m not kidding.

My birthday popped up again this year (funny how that keeps happening) and I celebrated 36 revolutions around the sun.

Christmas was great, as always. The best part of having kids is re-capturing the Christmas excitement we all used to feel when we were kids. Santa was good to us this year, bringing sleds for the kids even, and since it was a white Christmas (rare in Central Oregon!), we were able to get a bit of sledding in at my parents’ house—first time in years.

And finally, New Year’s Eve. I’ve written recently about how we planned to have a (smallish) New Year’s party, but unfortunately the kids got sick and we changed plans, and had a much quieter evening with a couple of friends. We celebrated 2008 and rang in 2009 with beer and champagne and good company, and here we are.

Previous installments: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

September

The beginning of the month was the latter half of Labor Day weekend, with my brother and sister-in-law still in town for another day or so. More beer drinking ensued.

On the third, I officially started my new job with Smart Solutions; I had been interviewing/talking with them for a few weeks before finally accepting, and as my first day coincided with the second day of school (and my last job ended right about when school let out in June), it was a lot like I’d "merely" taken the summer off.

Much of the rest of the month was uneventful as we discovered and fell into the new patterns of kids being back to school and my new job, but we definitely started to breathe easier and loosen up on the budget restrictions somewhat.

We made it downtown to Deschutes Brewery’s Jubelale launch party in the later half of the month for dinner and tasting of this year’s seasonal. I walked out with a free poster of the 2008 Jubelale label, signed by the artist.

And, we (finally) visited Three Creeks Brewing in Sisters at the end of the month for lunch and to check out the beer (and so I could write about it). It has good food and decent beers, and is definitely a win for Sisters (but not someplace we can get to very often).

October

One of my big goals at the beginning of 2008 was to attend the Great American Beer Festival in October. Seriously. Since it was going to be The Year for me as a Beer Blogger, I was all set. Unfortunately, my hours were cut, I lost my job, and then finally got a new job a month before, all of which kind of derailed those plans.

Early October revealed one of the perks of accepting a job with Smart Solutions: they sent me on a three-day business trip to Simi Valley, California (along with three co-workers) to attend SEO training. Maybe this seems ho-hum to many, but for me this was my first such business trip and, well, it was a big deal.

Mid-month, we went to Deschutes Brewery’s Fresh Hop Beer Tasting at their Mountain Room. Besides the Chocolate Beer Pairing Dinner (which was free to me), this was the first Deschutes event I’ve attended; it was a much more informal event than the Chocolate Pairing dinner, and the beer was flowing like water. Very cool, and worth doing again.

The final weekend of October we decided to take a trip out of town, and ended up visiting Hood River to pick apples. No kidding! We wanted a get-away weekend without any real schedule, and so checked out the Hood River Fruit Loop without any expectations. We left Saturday morning, made it to Hood River by lunchtime and found a great little orchard/BBQ place to eat. The rest of the afternoon was spent visiting various other orchards around the area, picking or buying apples (and pears), and generally having a good time. We ultimately ended up with about 25 pounds or so of fruit.

We capped the day with some drinks at Full Sail Brewing in downtown Hood River before driving into Portland to spend the night; it was a brief visit though, so I didn’t write about it. (Next time.) In Portland the next morning we visited our friends Justin and Raegan and their baby (whom we’d seen back in June also), and went out to breakfast with them.

Ironically, Justin was also coming down to Bend the next day on a work-related trip, so we went out to dinner that Monday night and got to visit even more.

Then, of course, Halloween capped the month; it was the warmest Halloween in recent memory, where we didn’t have to bundle up before going out trick-or-treating. The kids hauled away more candy than ever, probably because we were able to last longer without suffering frostbite.

You can catch up on the previous three installments here, here, and here.

July

It was a fairly uneventful month, low-key and budget-conscious. We enjoyed the Fourth of July by going to the annual Pet Parade downtown, and then checked out the action in Drake Park before hitting up the Library book sale and the free day at the Deschutes Historical Society (with ice cream even!). I posted some pictures here.

The following weekend we hit up the Bend Summer Festival, which is always my favorite of Bend’s seasonal ‘fests. It’s always a fun time, and despite the temptation to spend a lot of money, there’s plenty of free or cheap fun to be had (like at the kids activity center, which is always free—not the inflatable slides and bouncy castles, but the area sponsored by Working Wonders Children’s Museum).

I didn’t make it to the Oregon Brewers Festival this year, which was too bad since I received an invite to a media preview that would have been very, very cool if I could have made it. Another year.

August

We checked out the Deschutes County Fair on the First, taking advantage of the family free day. It’s always a balance between the free stuff—checking out the animals, and the exhibits, which is my favorite part of the fair—and the gouging prices of, well, anything that costs money. Like the rides. And the food. It makes it tough to justify going every year.

Midway through the month we had to travel to Florida suddenly, on family business that there’s never a good time for. We were gone for about a week overall. Aside from the family affairs, I was again struck by how much I don’t really care for Florida. It’s hot, and humid, and flat, and did I mention hot and humid? And a lot of a strip-mall kind of vibe… too suburban, maybe.

No, I can tolerate visiting Florida occasionally… but there’s no way I could ever live there.

August is when job search results started coming in… ironically, I got several calls while we were in Florida and unavailable.

The end of the month, going into Labor Day weekend, was great: my brother and sister-in-law came up for a surprise visit from San Diego. They stayed with us the whole time, and it turned into a weekend-long party (albeit a kid friendly one). Lots of beer was consumed and it was the perfect way to end the month.

Continuing my retrospective of 2008. You can catch up on Part 1 (January and February) and Part 2 (March and April) if you haven’t already.

May

By and large, May was rather uneventful but it did see a continuation on the job search front; I hadn’t yet ramped up to it but I did have the first of several interviews with a company that seemed promising. It ultimately didn’t work out, unfortunately, but it was definitely a good experience.

Memorial Day weekend we had a garage sale and cleared out a good portion of stuff that had been accumulating over the years. We went all-in on it, running an ad in the Bulletin as well as on craigslist; set up everything neatly displayed on tables in the driveway and the garage, and wouldn’t you know it—rain. I don’t remember if it rained on the first or the second day, though. It may have been the second, since we hustled and we were able to get everything pulled in to the garage and out of the weather.

At the end of the month, another beer blogging score: I received free tickets to Deschutes Brewery’s Chocolate Beer Pairing Dinner. This was our first event at the Brewery (aside from their annual garage sale), and we were pretty well blown away. The food, the beer, the company—all were excellent.

It was another notable blogging milestone, which I’m realizing more and more (as I write these) that 2008 was a hell of a good year for blogging (for me).

June

Naturally, the big news of note in June was that it was the month that I was laid off and officially became unemployed. As luck would have it, it coincided fairly neatly with the final week of school, so it turned out that I would have the summer off with the kids, and we could save money on childcare as a result.

Of course, since finding out my hours were cut, we cut spending way back and worked from a budget, which only got much tighter in mid-June. Saving money was the theme of the summer—along with "Job Search"—which you may have deduced after the fact when I wrote about free summertime activities on Hack Bend.

However, it was our tenth anniversary in 2008, and we had been planning a trip for months, and decided we weren’t going to abandon those plans despite being unemployed. That’s how the second half of June found my wife and I spending a weekend in Las Vegas, splurging and staying at the Venetian in one of their Medici Suites.

We gambled (eh), we saw Wayne Brady, and my brother and sister-in-law even drove up from San Diego to see us (whom we hadn’t seen in almost three years). It was hot—damn hot—but ultimately it was a good time.

The final weekend in June we ended up taking another trip to Portland and then to the Oregon Coast (we apparently traveled a lot in 2008!); lest you think this was yet another splurge, we actually had several agendas that coincided nicely: an eye doctor appointment for the kids (their specialist is in Lake Oswego); I had a job interview with an internet company; and we were able to visit my best friend and his and his wife’s new baby.

Since we had to be in Portland for the day anyway, we made a weekend out of it. You may remember I wrote about the trip in detail, and even posted pictures.

Of course, while in Newport we squeezed in a visit to the Rogue Brewery that I could write about. Of course, the really cool find was their Rogue Spirits Distillery; we still have some of that yummy Hazelnut Spiced Rum in the pantry.

…Now I need to go drink some.

I’ve already looked at the first two months of last year and what went on; now March and April.

March

I was interviewed by Peter Sachs of the Bulletin for a(nother) article on blogging. It was a front page article, and even though I didn’t have my picture in the paper this time around, I was the first blogger named and quoted. My blogging 15 minutes or something.

I took the week of Spring Break off to coincide with the kids being home from school. The first part of the vacation was pretty low key; but the final weekend we again took a trip over the mountains, this time to visit and stay with good friends in McMinnville.

It was a pretty cool trip. We went and visited A.C. Gilbert’s Discovery Village in Salem—A.C. Gilbert is the guy who invented the Erector Set, among a ton of other things—and the Discovery Village is a fantastic children’s museum. I highly recommend it if you’re visiting Salem.

We made a quick detour to Eola Hills Winery that day as well—that area is the heart of Oregon wine country, after all. They have a nice gift shop and a great tasting bar. Unfortunately it wasn’t Sunday, because they offer amazing-sounding Sunday brunches (with wine, naturally).

During that weekend, I managed to visit Golden Valley Brewery in McMinnville and was suitably impressed—it’s a cool place (check out the beer sampler in my review!) and they’ve got some tasty beer.

Ironically, the weekend we were away was the opening weekend of Trader Joe’s here in Bend—I’m only noting this here because almost the entire trip my wife was complaining that we were missing the Grand Opening. No, really—we got home late-ish afternoon on Sunday, and my wife went to Trader Joe’s just to see what it was like.

Trader Joe’s. That’s how we roll, yo.

And, the beginning of the end—for my job, that is. I found out midway through March that my hours were going to be cut back to half-time in "the near future." Unfortunately, this year was not the year to be working for a home builder. But they were extremely open and fair about the time cut, and what else can you do? I started looking around for full-time employment.

April

The month of April marked the six year anniversary of blogging for me—on April 22nd, specifically. We had a "blogger bash" get-together with a dozen or so folks showing up to the Summit Saloon in Downtown Bend—not as big a group as in February, certainly, but a lot of fun regardless. Afterwards, we (my wife, Simone, and I) had drinks with Kina at the Astro Lounge and made a night out of it.

At the beginning of the month (on the 3rd) I got a behind-the-scenes private tour of Deschutes Brewery with Jason Randles, who does marketing for the Brewery and whom I met through my Brew Site blog. See how this blogging thing is opening doors?

And then, similar to being interviewed by the Bulletin in the previous month, I was asked—in my capacity as a blogger—to be on a media panel at the Deschutes County offices along with other real members of the local media. The panel was supplementing media communications training for County employees, and as I wrote, "it was interesting and enlightening, and definitely something I’d do again if asked."

We took yet another trip over the mountains, again to McMinnville—our friends’ (the same ones we visited the previous month) daughter was turning one, so we went up for the weekend and the birthday party. We stayed with them again, and I believe it was this trip (at their house) that we discovered Rock Band, and what a freakin’ blast that game is.

And remember the notice that my hours were going to be cut back to half time? It happened in April. I don’t remember exactly when, but it was sometime around the middle of the month, I think. But maybe earlier; I had an interview for a position with Deschutes County near the beginning of the month as I started testing the waters for other employment.

Thus began the countdown.

2008 was a pretty eventful year, overall, and I wanted to go back through and put things in perspective.

As I started writing this yesterday, my initial thought was to fit three months per post, but so far the first two months have grown longer than I expected. So it may end up being a six-post retrospective! At the same time it’s interesting to go back through my blogs, email, pictures, etc., to piece together the various things that happened throughout the year. I keep running across something else to note—and I’m only two months in!

January

Even though my posting here on chuggnutt.com has really slacked off over the past couple of years (due mostly to the time and effort I’ve been putting into my other blogs), I did manage to get this site redesigned and activated on the first of January. Unfortunately, except for a few tweaks here and there, the state the site was in on 1/1 remained about the same throughout the year.

On the 15th I attended the Abyss launch party at Deschutes Brewery, which was exciting both for the fact that I was there as a blogger, taking some (crappy) pictures and writing about it afterward; and because I really love The Abyss and I was able to score a case of it on opening night (I wasn’t taking any chances that it would sell out).

The second half of the month, I drank a lot of cheap beer for a Theme Week on The Brew Site. It sounds frivolous but believe it or not it was the first time that beer blogging actually felt like work; I was drinking two (sometimes three) cans of American Macro beer a day for about a week and a half, and writing up two (sometimes three) reviews of those beers each day for a week’s time. So, yeah, like work.

On the other hand, it was kind of fun hunting down those big cans of cheap beer around town.

January was the month when I finally jumped about the twitter bandwagon. I don’t know that it’s all that important a milestone for 2008 (or my life in general), but everyone else seems to be ga-ga over it, so there you go.

And, a parenting milestone: January marks the first time that I had to stay home from work with a sick kid. This may not seem like a big deal, but until my wife went back to work the previous September, she was the at-home parent who dealt with such issues. Of course I’ve taken care of the kids myself many times—what makes this time standout is that it was the first time we had to deal with it as "working parents"; when my wife went back to work full time this was a big unknown to us.

February

The highlight of the month was the trip to Portland we took during the long President’s Day weekend. We went shopping, then to OMSI and checked out the cool dinosaur exhibit they were running, and had lunch at the Lucky Lab—I wrote about it, of course. I also wheedled a trip to John’s Marketplace and scored a bunch of specialty beer.

On the 21st there was a blogger meetup at the Blacksmith Restaurant. It was the first "real" Bend blogger meetup in ages, and my first visit to the Blacksmith since they renovated and re-opened as a premier beer bar. I didn’t get to stay for the entire time, but even for the short time I attended I was incredibly impressed with how the number of local bloggers has grown. Something like 30 people ultimately ended up coming.

On The Brew Site I did another Theme Week devoted to Canned Beers. In and of itself this isn’t really all that notable except for one thing: I interviewed a the lead PR guy for a brewery noted for their canned beers in an "official" capacity. For basically doing this blogging thing in my free time, that’s taking it to the next level.

Oh, and it was a leap year, so February had 29 days. Nothing big happened that I remember on the 29th, I just wanted to point it out.

Astute readers know (or can probably guess) that the software running my various blogs isn’t your standard blog software; in fact, it’s all PHP code that I wrote myself, and have gradually refined over the years.

Truth be told, though, I’m getting sick of it and I’m considering switch everything over to WordPress. Why? Here are some of my reasons:

• My own software is horribly out of date. It might have been cutting edge three or four years ago, but I just haven’t had time to keep up with the Joneses, as it were.
• To that end, I’m just one person with limited time; I can’t compete with an internet-wide community of open source developers contributing to the most popular free blogging platform around.
• The latest version, 2.7, is a major update and it’s really solid—and has all the administrative features I’d want in my own software anyway.
• It’s just time to get with the program.

Needless to say, I have a number of pros and cons as I’m thinking about this.

Pros:

• WordPress is PHP/MySQL, which is what I do. I’m enormously comfortable with it.
• I can still develop blogging tools in PHP in my spare time—just develop/release them for WordPress as plugins.
• My blogging will be much more efficient—one of the problems now is the admin tools on my current software are quirky—essentially I’m spending more effort managing data rather than writing.
• Automatic upgrades to the software (see the "community of open source developers" reason above).
• Ajax-y auto saving of blog posts—this is huge. I don’t have it in my homegrown software, and I’ve lost more than one post and cursed myself for not having an autosave feature.
• There are tons and tons of neat plugins that I’d love to have instant access to, which I would with WordPress. (Trying to get rid of my own "not invented here" attitude.)

Cons:

• It’s going to be a huge pain to migrate all the blogging data from my database tables to the WordPress tables. I have it all backed up, of course, but mapping from one schema to another is work.
• To that end, I may end up losing URL/path info (hello 404 errors!), tagging data, and years’ worth of other massaged data formatting or content. (The major stuff will be fine, of course.)
• Time to do and fix all of those issues, of course. As in, I don’t have that much time at hand.
• Image handling; I know WP likes to put everything under its "wp-content" directory, but I prefer storing images in an "images" directory. I don’t want to move them, and I’m unsure how configurable WP is in regards to it.

I’m thinking it’s going to happen, regardless. And no, I’m not considering any other blogging platforms; WordPress is the only one in consideration.

My wife made commented on yesterday’s post that I should "describe" the ornaments I received as gifts this year. Even better, here’s a picture of two:

Probably the best way I would "describe" them is "tongue in cheek".

Yep, time for the lame blog post about what I received for my birthday and Christmas. "Lame" because it’s kind of a blogging cliché, and mostly it feels like bragging. But something is better than nothing—especially around this blog lately.

Let’s see…

• Birthday and Christmas money and a gift certificate
• Christmas ornaments
• Anathem by Neal Stephenson
• Just After Sunset by Stephen King
• A couple of PS2 games
• A growler of Rogue Dead Guy Ale
• A beer of the month club subscription (3 months worth)
• A nifty sampler-sized English-style pint glass
• A custom-embroidered handkerchief
• An Acer Aspire One netbook computer
• The Dark Knight on Blu-Ray
• Handmade gifts from the kids
• A Food Saver vacuum sealer (more of a household gift)

I think that about covers it.