2008 in review, part 1

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.