2008 Summed Up In A Couple Of Paragraphs

I’ve decided this year needs it’s own wrap up. We’ve gone through a lot of changes in 2008 and I wanted to get them down for later review.

The year started off with Lisa in Zanesville and me in Virginia. Lisa did make it to Stafford for New Years but as I recall it wasn’t that great. We went to an Italian restaurant called Amici’s I think. The food was okay and the guy playing the piano was loud.

Lisa made it out to Virginia on several more occasions. We did the trips to D.C. and Gettysburg and that kind of stuff. Basically your typical fun-filled Brian and Lisa activities. During the year we pursued our favorite pastime and went to a movie just about every week this past summer. We saw Ironman, Baby Momma, and The Dark Knight, Quantum of Solace, Rock'n'Rolla, Marley & Me and more than I can remember. All the time I had been applying for a new job. I enjoyed the job at Quantico and felt like I was just starting to get the hang of being a site manger and there I was looking for a career change. And as some of you know I got the new job.

So in June Lisa, Moon and I moved to St Charles, Missouri. We've really liked it here but it never felt like home. We were renting because I wasn't sure if I would like the new job or not. It was a nice house but not ours. We had a whole parade of visitors to St Charles. My niece Ashley, Lisa's sister, her brother and mother, her niece and nephew and my Mom and Dad all came out on different occasions. The normal site to take our visiting tourists was the Jefferson Expansion National Memorial (ie the Arch). One of our favorite pastimes was barbecuing in the back yard and beer on the front porch, watching traffic go by and gas prices go up and down. Sometime in October I applied for a transfer to Colorado Springs. I was passed over at first. The guy Colorado Springs hired turned them down and I got a second chance. It was a no brainer to accept but it was still a tough thing to do. Lisa started preparing for the move.

Finally the week of Christmas we moved our household goods to Littleton and Colorado Springs. I've returned to St Louis to work until January 16th. I'm staying at Intown Suites which is a pretty anticlimactic way to depart from a good home although Lisa came in for the New Year and we're staying at a nice Marriott in Creve Coeur. Like I mentioned, we've loved it here in St Charles, it was really our first home together as a family and we'll miss it I'm sure. The 29th of December was an especially rough day. Lisa and I went to the house one last time to drop off keys and we got pretty sad saying good bye to the neighborhood. And then we went to see the worst movie ever and that didn't help.

The End Of 2008

All I can say is thank God. Maybe 2009 will be better. Actually, for me that's really just a joke, so far it hasn't been that bad for us. Not economy-wise anyway. I took a pay cut to take my current job and the adjustment has been a little rough but the pay off is we have a normal life. So now I don't know if our hard times are a result of the crappy economy or my crappy pay check.

The USA Today cover story from yesterday was about American's digging deep to save money. Maybe the recession will be good for us. It seems like people are working to pay down credit card debt. It doesn't make sense to me why it's a crisis when the interest rate for credit cards is 27% but people were still charging when it was only 18%. Lisa and I have stopped eating out since we can now enjoy the thrill of making our own food. I guess luxury is a matter of perspective.

In other news Martina McBride will be performing with Elvis in a video. She'll be inserted into his comeback special. I would like to meet anyone that thinks this is a good idea. I would like to know why that person would enjoy it. I assume that there is a demand for it or they wouldn't do it. I saw Celine Dion's duet with the King on the American Idol special and it was disgusting, and it would have been even without Celine. I just don't get it.

They are also apparently killing off Bruce Wayne as Batman for a reboot. There's another term I've grown to hate over the years. Maybe curmudgeons are only people that have been around long enough to see it all come back around and think it was better the first time. Sometimes a reboot works, like James Bond (which made $70 million this weekend) or the Batman movies but now it's just getting old. From the retooled Star Wars with Greedo firing first to the new Star Trek, reboot is a fancified word for retread.

Right now things aren't looking good for the big three auto makers. I remember I was devastated when AMC disappeared in 1987. Do you remember when you were so new it seemed like everything was always there and always would be. I can't imagine that the government will let them go under. GMC has $16 billion in operating cash which they estimate will last until sometime next year so $25 billion split three ways won't help for long. When I was young I also didn't think I would be around to see the fall of the US as the world's financial leader either. Hopefully I'm just over reacting and they'll all be able to turn it around, just like Chrysler under Lee Iacocca and Harley Davidson after AMF Voight did.

And finally the Simpsons featured the New York Times crossword puzzle in last Sunday's episode, which I found odd.