2009 in Review

While I've done month by month reviews before, I think I will break from that format this year. Instead, here's a thematic look back:

notable stuff: I was shortlisted for CBC's Canada Writes, I celebrated turning 40 by watching Hubby smash the hell out of a cake, I got sucked into Twitter, I got a lot of food out of the garden, and we safely navigated the H1N1 scare.

web finds: This year, I fell out of love with Go Fug Yourself after several site redesigns and a new ad partner meant the site itself was fugly and annoying. However, I still like snark and for that, I now go to Regretsy which skewers some of the quirkier things listed on Etsy and Cakewrecks which does the same for "professionally designed cakes." The primary difference between the two is that Regretsy content frequently skirts an NC17 rating whereas Cakewrecks barely rates a PG so I can share the posts with Kiddo.

While I dearly miss At the Movies (and its follow up, which I refer to as the Ebert and Assclown years), I continue to get Ebert's reviews via a weekly email newsletter from the Chicago Sun-Times. I don't know why I hadn't noticed it before but Ebert also has a blog -- and it is full of awesome that is sometimes but not always related to movies. Speaking of awesome (and occasionally NSFW) the comic/info stuff at the Oatmeal often makes me laugh. I finally added it to my Google Reader yesterday after reading this post.

new toys: In the spring, I got a bike but I am a weather sissy and will not ride when it is overly hot, overly cold or overly wet so I have used it less than would be ideal. In the be-careful-what-you-wish-for category, I won an OTTO coffee machine. While it is very pretty, it's a pain to use. For Christmas I got two new toys: a Flip UltraHD Camcorder and a serger both of which come with learning curves. As a family, we also got a PS3 (which I love), a Macbook (for app development), and a Wii Balance Board with Wii Fit, which promptly told me I was fat and should exercise more. (Well, duh.)

escapes: Early in the year we went to Vegas. Bad idea; that city is not our kind of place. As a family, we like elbow room and clean air, two things that are at a premium in Vegas. We cleansed our palate with a weekend at Beach Acres, a few trips to Vancouver, a family weekend in Nanoose Bay, and a much-needed anniversary retreat to Sooke Harbour House. We also spent Christmas at Beach Acres, though that trip was probably more ambitious than the season called for.

play time: Over the year, I spent a lot of time caring for my Moshi Monster and, inside Facebook, playing a trio of addictive games: Lexulous, PackRat, and Bejeweled Blitz. While I have a bunch of games on my iPod, my faves are still the PopCap games -- Bejeweled, Bookworm and, of course, Chuzzle -- I highly recommend all three for any platform (and Zuma, too, which we bought for the PS3.)

I read a fair number of books, though there are still many unfinished tomes beside my bed. I found that Charlie Huston's crime novels are great fun to chew through, as was a novel based on characters from the TV series Bones (which I've never watched) -- I found it among the books at the Beach Acres cabin. I also read a number of books by local author Karen Rivers. Her blog and twitter feed regularly make me laugh (and snort) but her books... well, I won't likely pick up any more; they're well written but not to my taste.

I've been struggling to recall which movies I saw in the theatre this year. I know we saw plenty; here's what I remember (after searching the web for 2009 releases!): Race to Witch Mountain, Watchmen, Coraline, Up, Julie and Julia, Monsters vs. Aliens, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Paul Blart: Mall Cop, Public Enemies, Inglorious Basterds, 9, Star Trek 11, Zombieland, A Christmas Carol, and 2012. You can probably guess which ones we saw with Kiddo.

***

Happy New Year!

Rewind and Fast Forward through 2008

[I decided to save some creative time and edited our Christmas letter just slightly for my blog readers. Don't worry, I didn't trim out any of the "good stuff" -- besides, regular readers will have already read more detail in posts through the year!]

As you may know, 2008 was a busy year for Those DeWolfes. January turned out to be very busy at work for me as digitization projects started to (finally) roll in, complete with deadlines but it was also the month that Hubby and I both got new digital SLR cameras. In February, we tackled renovations of the bathroom in the townhouse which turned out to be a bit tricker than we had hoped and coincided with Hubby coming down with pneumonia. In March, Kiddo celebrated her 7th birthday with an hour of bouncing, running, jumping and spinning at Victoria Gymnastics. One of her gifts was a Wii, something that turned out to be fun for the whole family. A few weeks later, Hubby rang in his 40th birthday with a pub crawl and the gift of LEGO robotics -- he immediately set about designing a SwifferBot to go after cat hair and random dust on the main floor. May found us all working on various creative things -- some we started, some we finished and some we shared (Kiddo and I made a batch of recycled crayons and wrote up a tutorial that we posted online).

June was very busy for Kiddo, especially. She went go-carting with Hubby, had major dental work (some extractions and 8 fillings!), dressed like a pirate and walked in the Buccaneer Days parade, rode a ferris wheel for the first time (the only midway ride I can tolerate), and finished grade one! At the end of the month, I celebrated my birthday (turning 39) with a family brunch and a night out.

In July Hubby and Kiddo made a little stop-motion animation film based on Crazy Frog (it's on YouTube if you have yet to see it). After that, we took a much needed family vacation. In a little over a week we drove all the way to the top of Vancouver Island and back, stopping here and there along the way. The goal was for Kiddo to see Port Alice -- and stand in front of the "welcome" sign there. We did that as well as seeing many other communities that were new to all of us -- prior to the trip, the furthest north on the Island either Hubby or I had been was to Courtenay and Comox. It was a great trip, overall, though we were all glad to get home. Unfortunately, that welcome home turned out to be pretty crummy as the Strata had authorized someone to climb into our property and pressure wash the fence, destroying a few hundred dollars in plants and property in the process. Needless to say, that sealed the deal for our wanting to move.

August started with hiring a Realtor and looking at houses but after getting close to putting in an offer, we realized we needed to sell our townhouse first and thus began an intense six weeks of preparation. We packed, and packed, and packed until our storage locker was full. Then we had a home stager come in (a service provided by the Realtor) who told us we still had too much stuff. GAH! So, we got a U-Pack and filled it, too. Meanwhile, Hubby finished his sculpture of Cthulhu and we moved it to a friend's backyard for safe-keeping (there are photos a-plenty online and a video too if you want to get a closer look).

September started with painting and having the carpets replaced then we put the finishing touches on the staging and listed the townhouse September 15th. Inside a week we had an offer which we accepted and were able to use that to put an offer in on a lovely older home that had plenty of quirks -- just about right for us. By the first week of October, everything was signed-off and by Thanksgiving we were living under a new roof just as the real estate market was collapsing across the country!

With the new address came a new school for Kiddo -- she is now attending a traditional school which means wearing a uniform (though it's not terribly strict). She has adapted well and seems to be thriving in the split grade 1/2 classroom; she is now reading at a grade 7 level and is also ahead in math and science.

Right away, we started renovations, replacing the interior stairs (they were narrow and lacked sufficient clearance) and arranging to have the old asbestos-laced insulation removed from the attic and replaced. By late November we were able to get the U-Pack delivered! I did two craft fairs back to back at the end of November and beginning of December which we followed with a trip to the mainland (IKEA!) and then we all settled in to getting things settled -- putting up shelving, unpacking, sorting, and decorating for Christmas.

And then the snow-dump of 2008 hit we got a rare white Christmas in Victoria (in fact it was the first time since 1971 that there was snow coast to coast across Canada).

As always, thanks for reading; I'd like to wish you all the best in 2009!

Looking back ...

In case you've just joined this blog, already in progress, here's a quick little overview of what I did in 2007:

Jan - started contributing to theVictoria Grid Project; drafted a big list o' unfinished tasks
Feb - managed to get very very sick for Valentine's day
Mar - designed the first of the Huggitz creatures
Apr - Drupalized and re-launched FrugalVictoria.com
May - travelled to Naramata; visited the Abkhazi Garden for the first time
Jun - cleared out the storage locker, reassessed our big list o' unfinished tasks
July - Spent an entire day reading Harry Potter; decluttered some more
Aug - had a fun, productive, busy, creative month then broke my ankle
Sept - recovered from broken ankle and relaunched 951.cupe.ca as a Drupal-driven site.
Oct - celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary; madeover my etsy shop
Nov - traveled to Parksville and Burlington; blogged every day for NaBloPoMo
Dec - sold lots at the Libraries craft fair; designed my first knitting pattern, the Ma Cobb hat.

Here's a mosaic of some of the many, many things I sewed, knitted, beaded and otherwise handcrafted in 2007...

Though there were many hurdles in 2007, we pulled through it with our health in tact, our home in one piece and our bellies... well, maybe a little too full.