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.