2006: Year in Review

As much as I’m glad to celebrate the New Year, I hate to see that 2006 has come to an end. Exactly 365 days ago, I was laying next to my then-girlfriend-now-fiancé in her home state of Washington watching how drunk Seattle news reporters ring in the New Year atop the Giant Prick (a.k.a. Space Needle). I was jobless, depressed and down on my luck, and even though I was to fly back to Chicago in a few days, I really wondered if coming back was truly the right thing to do.

It didn’t take very long to see whether or not the craptacularity was going to carry over into 2006. A week after coming back, I received word that Ed had gone missing. After searching his place for clues and discovering that the WrestleMania 22 shirt that I gave him and a Chuck Palahniuk book that I loaned him were missing, I felt comforted in a sick and perverse sort of way at the thought that those items could be his last worldly possessions before he was raped, killed and raped again Katie Vick style before being dismembered and eaten by a pack of hungry werewolves horny for some shit-brickin’ mud-butt flesh. On the other hand, my worries of his disappearance were deepened further by the discovery of his hockey stick. Oh Ed… you should have known that the hockey stick would not only have made a great weapon in self-defense against werewolves, but would have also given you better stability in preventing another dislocated knee or twisted ankle running away from said werewolves in the middle of some the meanest and scariest Wisconsin woods. In retrospect, Ed never was in any real danger, and the best thing that came out of that night was a free dinner courtesy of his uncle.

In February, I flew out to Tennessee to hang out with Carl and Eric for our annual Super Bowl outing which is now the longest running tradition among friends. The trip started out well – sight-seeing in Nashville and a tour of the Jack Daniels distillery – but took a turn after I literally hit rock bottom and fell into a river. Camera!

No matter how shitty the year was going so far, the one thing that kept my spirits up was WrestleMania at the end of March. Next to the Olympics and World Cup, WrestleMania is probably the next biggest global phenomenon out there, and I was glad to be a part of it sitting ringside along with three of my closest wrasslin buddies and the people from around the world that we met there.

March also marked my return to the workforce. After working at several big name organizations since coming out of school a few years ago, I could honestly say that I’ve finally found my niche in the workplace.

One of the things that I’ve always wanted to do was spend a week driving cross-country from one end of the United States to the other. In July, I came close to doing that, driving across two-thirds of the country from Washington State back to Chicago. After doing the drive through the most boring parts of the U.S., I don’t think I want to drive cross-country anymore.

A month later, Cathy and I made it to our vacation spot, the San Juan Islands. A beautiful sunset along the Pacific Ocean, I couldn’t ask for a better time and place to propose than right at that moment.

And the rest is pretty much history. 2006 started out rough, but things smoothed out eventually. It was a memorable year and hopefully there will be more good times to come in 2007. Happy New Year!

Public Service Announcement: Google Reader

I’m not usually one for giving tech tips or web advice, but in the wake of this week’s tragic story, sharing something that I use everyday with others is the least that I could do for someone who, through the articles he wrote, has educated many including myself in the way of new tech gadgetry.

For those of you who aren’t using a news aggregator, why not? News aggregators can save you quite a bit of time since the content on all of your favorite websites can be found in this nifty one-stop-shop web tool. And since aggregators are updated dynamically, you’re always in the know with the most up-to-the-minute information. Most content is in headline format and includes the first couple sentences of an article – this gives you the ability to quickly skim and read only the articles you are most interested in.

Do me a favor and get Google Reader (it’s in their Google Labs section). If you’re new to RSS technology or unsure about what to do with those XML buttons that you see on websites, Google Reader makes it really easy to subscribe to groups of websites at a time by clicking on a single button. Need a news feed? Click on the News bundle and you get feeds to six different websites. Google Reader is blog-friendly as well. If the blogs you like to read are on popular host sites like Blogger, Flickr, or Myspace, all you need to do is enter their user name, and just like that, you’ve created a feed to that user’s blog.

Another great feature of Google Reader is the ability to “star” certain pieces of content so that you can share it with others. Bloggers like me have used this feature as a side item to their blogs giving readers the ability to check out websites that bloggers look at on a regular basis.

So go ahead and get Google Reader. And while you’re doing that, make the Google Personalized Homepage your home page. You can move gadgets around to truly make it the page you want it to be and include only the things that are most important to you.

Our First Christmas Tree

And it's a real one too! I never knew that picking up fallen needles and watering the tree constantly could be so much fun. If only the fake ones could smell this good...