2007: The Year of Writing Poorly

Thank God! It's time for the lazy journalist's favorite year-end space-waster: the end-of-year retrospective! In this case, a year of mangled sentences that defy the most intrepid grammatician. A year of ivy, weddings, apathy (fanatical and canine), Prius-induced smugness, collie hair, and weather.

Let's get this over with.

01/06/07. In which my diet turns dark: next time I'm coming at you with a kiddie badge, low blood sugar, and a sharpened piece of bok choy, and you're going down.

02/18/07. In which we have that one sunny day in February and we get a little goofy: The sun gets so mobbed by all the sun-starved Pacific Northwesterners, it doesn't come back for four months.

02/21/07. In which I venture to the zoo solo: Today the sun was out, so I TOOK OFF. Actually I worried for an hour about the drive and my gas gauge, left the garage, got about six blocks and wondered how I was going to manage to eat expensive and awful zoo food for lunch, turned around, ate a sandwich, changed my coat (because the first one seemed too, non-zoo-like), and then TOOK OFF.

02/28/07. In which too much TV on Oscar Night produced some unnecessary babble: Penelope Cruz: Why does it take such high tech engineering to make a dress stay on her body? It looks like she's wearing a suspension bridge with feathers…..and …somebody sewed sleeves onto the sides of Naomi Watts' strapless bumblebee outfit. I'm glad she realized they were sleeves and not just odd tubes hanging off the side of her dress at underarm level. Because that would have just been silly.

03/24/07. In which I relive a moment from my less-than-stellar basketball cheerleader career and post a highly entertaining set of Duck basketball pictures contrasting shorts styles over the years: (Oh, hi, Kathi. Hi, Julie. Nice scrunchi. When does the game start? What, this is half time? Oops. Sorry.)

04/27/07. In which I explain the Read To The Dogs program: It's some program where they allow kids to read to dogs, because dogs won't correct them or make fun of their poor reading skills. But I certainly will.

05/03/07. In which I obsess about the TV show Jericho, and helpfully provide them with a pledge: I, state your name, pledge to the town of Jericho that I will fight to the death as long as the viewers don't get too attached to me, in which case I will fight until I get a sexy-looking cut on my face, and that I promise to be cuter than the New Bern residents so the viewers know who to root for. One town, under CBS, in sweeps week, with access to the town salt mine for all.

05/25/07. In which I buy a Prius and not only get really smug, but correctly predict a mild hurricane season: So if you don't get killed in a global-warming-caused hurricane this summer, you can thank me come next fall, 'cause I probably saved your ass.

05/31/07. In which I prove my abilities to bore with work stories and explain the County Auditor’s office: if you enter the Ministry, you must take a number and sit down along with many people with various issues, including, apparently, loss of such things as bathing rights, voice modulation, and child rearing skills, and then wait for the privilege of getting to take another, better number. Time is money and odors are, apparently, free.

06/06/07. In which Dean gets to go to the US Olympic Training Center: So, sorry about your kid not being as awesome as mine and all.

06/27/07. In which I try to work the above into some conversations: “Hi, I'm sorry my son couldn't come with me today. He's at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. Working out with the National Team. What? I know he has never come to work with me before. I'm just saying. If he wanted to come with me, he couldn't. He's really, really training.”

07/09/07. In which I give a belated graduation speech and impress only myself: So get up early again. Go to practice again. Study more. Volunteer more. Give more. It's all sacrifice, and everything comes of sacrifice, and nothing comes of no sacrifice. I think God likes the smell of sweat.

07/21/07. In which we return to the garden store for another pine after Drew manages to make an ex-pine of one purchased earlier: It was like Drew was shopping for a second puppy because the first one wouldn't wake up after he squeezed it too hard.

07/27/07. In which I succumb to the make-up ladies at Origins in preparation for the upcoming wedding festivities: She had just never seen make-up try to escape a face before.

08/06/07. Dean and Jenny get married on 08/04/07, host a kick-ass wedding, and I post some pictures, but I don’t really have anything original to say. So we’ll move on.

08/21/07. In which God smacks the Smug out of me (temporarily) for all that “my Prius is going to solve that global-warming-caused hurricane problem” by naming the one deadly hurricane of the season “Dean.”

09/05/07. In which God re-smacks the Smug out of me by allowing it to be hit by a Ford F-250: LOOK WHERE YOU'RE GOING, DUMBASS! And don't use my FAVORITE CAR AS A BRAKE!

09/23/07. In which I try to explain collie training: Training a collie is like training your college roommate. If you tell them to do something, they'll ask you why. If you ask them to do something for a reward, they will decide that apathy is the best reward. If you punish them for not doing what you say, they will become deeply offended, and ignore you until the Resident Assistant agrees to give them a new room assignment.

10/22/07. In which I react to Drew’s painful illness: He may have to get tubes put in his ears to reduce the constant cold-to-ear-infection cycle he goes through every year, which is several kinds of funny.

11/02/07. In which I elicit long-distance coffee-spewing by relating the following conversation from the Humane Society:

Elderly Lady, bringing in a cat that she obviously loves but can't keep: "...and I have papers that say she's been spayed."
Clerk: "Oh, good, because otherwise we would have to guess."
Elderly Lady: "What do you mean you would have to gas her?"
Clerk: "No, GUESS. We would have had to GUESS."

12/15/07: In which I let out a little anxiety about Dean’s trip to New Zealand-Tasmania-New Zealand: So pray for him. Or chant for him. Or send your vibrations of Celestine oscillations in his general direction. Or use whatever positive rays "The Secret" teaches you to shoot. Or just raise your Jesus antennae and let them wave.

12/22/07: In which I used the phrase “the shizzle.”

Let’s end this on that high note and hope 2008 brings better writing to all, especially me.