15. 2008 year in review etc.

Hi. First, here are my resolutions for 2009 (I forgot to make any resolutions for 2008 [other than a goal time for my half marathon {which I totally smashed}] which was a mistake because my resolution for 2007 was completely and totally successful and I was on a resolution roll [my 2007 resolution was for peace, unfortunately not world peace - I should have made a resolution for world peace but I didn't know how successful the resolution would be at the time I made it, so I selfishly resolved only for personal peace] and I felt too much pressure to make a good resolution after that one - how do you top peace? - and so I kept putting it off and putting it off and here we are, the year is over, it's too late to make a resolution for 2008):

1. Stop drinking the drip coffee at work. It's gross and there's no point.
2. Equip.
3. Motion.

Obviously two of them are not in the form of traditional resolutions but I refuse to elaborate. Also, perhaps I should add my new half marathon goal time as Resolution #4 but since I didn't count that as a resolution last year I won't this year.

Now, here is my 2008 Year In Review:

In January I joined a running group and it was the first time I'd ever run with anyone else. It turned out to be very awesome and it kept me busy and beat up through the middle of July. I'll be starting it all over again in a week or two and I can hardly wait.

In January I got a job. Turns out, working full-time makes me surly. But hey.

In January I bought a Fisher MC4040 for $15 at Goodwill. I was so enamored with it until I realized that there's no A+B speaker setting. There's A, there's B, there's Off, that's it. Regardless, what a beautiful piece of equipment.

In January I started going to Lady Griz games with Jordon and Xtino. That was rad.

Etc. I'm not going to detail each month of the year like this, that would be ridiculous.

In June I got a black toenail. It wasn't black, it was blue, and then it turned into a very pretty marbled brown. It took forever to go away. Maybe it was from running, I never found out.

In October I went on the best trip to Seattle that ever was.

In November my car died on multiple occasions and it really hurt my feelings.

In December I moved south of the river. The Clark Fork is born near Butte (where it is briefly known as Silver Bow Creek) and flows northwestward through Missoula into Idaho, where it feeds into Lake Pend Oreille, which turns into a river and flows into Washington, meandering into Canada for a second before turning around and coming back down to meet the Columbia River, which heads south awhile before turning abruptly west for the ocean, and I have not lived south of this water since California almost six years ago.


People who live south of the river are funny - they talk funny and dress funny and smell funny and now I am one of them. My little Rattlesnake alley house was my retreat for two years, and I was inches away from Greenough Park and Mount Jumbo and all those other things like bears and mountain lions and the moon and dysfunctional neighbor relations. I dug up my primroses and dianthuses and one strawberry plant to take with me across the river but I left behind tulips and crocuses and strawberries and lilies and lupins. My alley house was heaven in the summertime. My new neighborhood will probably smell like poo once things thaw out. The only bright spot in this horrible stinky debacle is that I'm two blocks from Dairy Queen, but even that's an unattainable carrot because Dairy Queen is closed for the winter. (I'm just kidding, I'm in love with my new house, but that's probably because I don't have a roommate yet.)

A while ago someone said something to me like, "If only you'd moved to Sandpoint" and I stopped for a second... yes, I was going to move back home and I even started telling people that I was going to move and I would have told my boss if I weren't such a chicken. Then at the end of July I went to Sandpoint for a week and I missed Missoula and decided to stay here until at least next April (or August). I feel like I'm supposed to be in Missoula now, for whatever reason. Maybe I'm just wasting time and trying to convince myself of things that aren't true, I don't know, but I did move back here after six years elsewhere and I do have some good things going on. But who cares, back to the issue at hand.

In December I got rid of my Seattle phone number. This took me two and a half years, it was not easy. I did not want to leave Seattle. I had more fun in Seattle than anywhere. Seattle has a reputation for being a hard place to get to know people - nice, polite, but distant and not particularly friendly - but I made more friends there than I ever did anywhere. I loved living in Seattle. And I was coming here for one year to finish my stinking master's degree and my friends and I said I could move back to Seattle after that, and I could have, but I knew I wouldn't. Now that I've finally gotten a Missoula phone number it's pretty much guaranteed that I'll be leaving soon, right? I don't know.

Before I moved back to Missoula I dreamed I got hit by a car on South Avenue by Goodwill. I was walking across the street and bam, I flew through the air. For the next two days I went to work (at the law firm in Seattle but in Missoula) but then went back to the scene of the accident, talked to some of the witnesses, and found out that I'd been killed. Turns out, after I'd gotten hit and flown through the air, I landed, splat, dead. I felt bad for the people who'd had to witness it, apparently it was pretty horrible, but mostly I was worried that HR would see the date on my death certificate and wouldn't pay me for those two days that I worked after I'd died. For reasons no doubt of great psychological interest, I moved to Missoula anyway.

In December the Fates decided to stop shitting on me (those bastards) and the CD player in my car miraculously came back to life. Also, I had an incredible yoga session.

Too long, sorry. No more reflecting or resolving for now.

14. Happy holidays

I've been watching too many movies on the teevee.

13. Weather, teeth, running shoes

This morning it was warm and foggy in Missoula. Some people were wearing hats and gloves, some people weren't. Two people were walking across the river smoking a pipe and one of them said, "Is that how you can tell the people who were born here?" and the other said, "Yup." They were trying to draw some sort of birthplace/hardiness correlation, but they did not take stupidity or frizzy hair into account.

These days all I can do is wait until it's bedtime again. That's because I'm so excited to brush my teeth. I have a new toothpaste, you see, a very fancy toothpaste. It's so fancy it's available only by prescription. It's so fancy it's not even called toothpaste, it's dentifrice.

Yes, I have gone to the dentist, after two and a half years of not going to the dentist. I have a very fancy dentist. It's not like having a dentist at all, actually, it's like having a family of dentists. At my first visit, one of them did all this stuff to me, and then another one came in and did more stuff. He was the Head Dentist and he is in love with my teeth. He was very complimentary and then he tried to sell me a very fancy and expensive mouth guard. I said I'd think about it, even though I didn't intend to think about it at all.

I left for a couple weeks and then went back for another dentist visit. The person I visited with this time was not so in love with my teeth and she spent an hour doing pretty mean things, like poking needles into my gums to see if they'd bleed. They did. But she gave me the fancy toothpaste and told me to come back in six months. She told me to stop brushing so hard and she gave me a fairy-soft toothbrush. The good thing about having a family of dentists is that they don't know who's already given you a toothbrush, so now I have two fairy-soft toothbrushes, ha! They are both mauve.

I now have two of nearly everything: two toothbrushes, two stereos, two houses, for a minute today I had two car batteries. My two current pairs of running shoes are both nearing the end of their useful lives and will need to be replaced soon. Hopefully I'll be able to find some red ones.