Starting with a gratuitous pretty picture - TQ & I went for a great hike in the Pound Ridge Reservation on Christmas Eve Day, it was a beautiful day, there was still lots of snow on the ground & we chose a five and a half mile loop.
I'm back in Brooklyn now, and TQ's back in PA, and I thought my first post when I got home would be about the interesting thing I saw for the first time in Mill Basin when TQ & I picked that as a good destination for a small-craft advisory day.
But I did have a little time to browse some blogs while we were up in CT, and I rather liked the idea Capt. JP recently floated (ha ha) in his blog as a nice end-of-year activity - namely, to look back over our blogs & pick out a few of our favorite posts of 2009.
2009 hasn't been my best year ever. Hasn't quite been the worst year, there are a couple of years that are tied for that honor, but it's been rough. Primarily because of the work situation, which has been pretty close to overwhelming at times (although it seems like everybody I know has either too much work, or none, and I really prefer being in the former situation), and then I'm still missing Hawaii a lot (I do hope to get out there for my 25th high school reunion in 2010, though). I guess you'd think that I'd list TQ moving far enough away that getting to see him has gone from a 2-hour Metro North jaunt to an overnight Greyhound trip as one of my grievances - oddly enough, though, although things haven't worked out quite as he'd hoped, in some ways I still think the move's been a good enough thing for him that it balances out the added aggravation. No, that's not really one of my favorite posts - just one that reflects one major development this year.
So, yeah, not my best year ever. And all along, I sort of felt like that was slopping over here.
But looking things over - I did manage to get in a few good posts here!
Here are a random few:
My favorite actual BOATING post of the year:
I've been a bit bummed out about how my continuing kayak education ground to a halt this year. With the changes in the BCU last year, Sebago chose to re-embrace the ACA. Unfortunately, the training sessions to turn the Sebago coaches back into red-blooded American Canoe Association coastal kayaking instructors of various levels happened right in the middle of budget season at the day job, and asking for a couple of vacation days to go get myself recertified as a kayak instructor would've gone over about as well as ham for Chanukah (heh heh). Didn't even make it up to Lake Sebago to help out with a class once all summer.
But thanks to Sebago's Sailing Committee, I did have one phenomenal learning experience this year, the sort of thing that I just couldn't WAIT to get home & write up. The post ended up being pretty long - I could easily have made it into a 2 or 3 post thing - but it was My First Dinghy Race and in the end I just couldn't stop writing until I had everything down!
It wasn't a good race. Not a bit. But boy, did our sailing co-chairs ever carpe the teachable moment afterwards. I can't read that post without finding myself champing at the bit to try it again.
Possibly the most generally useful post of the year:
Every now and then, I actually post something here that could actually be considered "useful". Usually that's just a regurgitation of somebody else's information - I always end up doing a cold-water boating piece with links in the Spring, plus when specific important safety things come up I'll usually re-post those here (this year's big ones being an Orion flare notice & then of course the ones about the new off-season lifejacket use requirements - a lot of people have come here through searches for both of those this year). But my particular favorite of the actually-trying-to-be-helpful ilk was actually one of my multiple responses to Tillerman's Lists challenge. I think I did three - the first two were painfully kayak-geeky, think it was the 5 things a kayaker needs to pass a New York vessel safety check and then the sixty-seven other things you actually should have to paddle safely - but the last one was 24 Great Ways to Get On The Water In NYC, and although I am not big on self-back-patting, I really thought that I came up with a good assortment of boating possibilities, enough to make just about anybody happy, and none too horribly expensive. That got a ton of hits when it got picked up by NewYorkOlogy, which is a great site for finding fun things to do in NYC.
Post that got the comments that cracked me up the most:
OK - there was one where I posted a terrible, terrible pun in pseudo-French, and that brought on a whole string of like-minded puns (like I think it was Capt. JP himself who offered the motto of the French navy: "A l'eau, c'est l'heure!"). That was a pretty funny bunch of comments but I can't remember the bad pun that started things off. Anybody? The one I do remember as giving me the repeated giggles was the March explanation of where I came up with "frogma" (dogma of the amphibious). The comments were so good, I made a separate post out of them.
Post that incited the most jealousy:
This one.
Mwahahaha!
Check the comments in that post if you don't know who got jealous, or why. A-HA! Added bonus - that was where the original pseudo-French pun popped up!
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It's getting late & I need to get up to go paddling in the AM (yay! tamale paddle II!) so I will wrap things up here with one last post...although it does seem odd that I haven't listed a single paddling post here! Well, the time is what it is, so here it is, last but not least:
Best Post Left by Some Total Airhead Who Got Into My Blog After I Forgot To Sign Out After Blogging At Kinko's (That's My Story And I'm Sticking To It):
Totally Cool Soho Stores Fighting Global Warming!
Indeed. One Newtonian air conditioner at a time. That Bubbles, what a piece of work!
Capt. JP, thanks for the good idea. Fun to really take a good look back over the year!
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