FOCS best of 2009

Nothing stands out, but there were a few posts that were okay

Captain JP has issued, not a challenge, but at least a suggestion to his fellow bloggers. While he's digesting the surfeit of holiday foods (especially the mince pies), he'd like to read the best of what we have written over the past year.

I will have to admit, 2009 didn't have the same sorts of high points that 2008 did. Instead, the year started on a low note, with somebody deciding to celebrate the New Year by vandalizing our truck, and it got lower from there. The first post of the year, I started with a tagline "I sure hope 2009 is better than 2008 was," but that didn't happen. Instead, it was worse.

There was my major computer crash in January that caused me to lose just about everything, since the backup files had somehow become corrupted and wouldn't load. There were Internet access problems caused by a squabble between my ISP and the bigger telecom company from which it bought services. There was the flu that I caught in March, which left me with a lingering cough that just wouldn't go away – I'm pretty sure I was one of the first people in the country to get H1N1, which hadn't even been identified yet but which is characterized by a horrible cough. Pat's dad in South Texas has been in deteriorating health, and so Pat has been dealing with a lot of headaches trying to take care of him from a distance. My work obligations kept us from being able to go on the solar eclipse cruise that most of the rest of the family took to celebrate my parents' 50^th wedding anniversary. We've had issues with vehicles needing repairs that we can't afford. And our home in Albuquerque got burglarized again, a near repeat of the 2007 incident, except that these burglars didn't take anything of great sentimental value – the previous burglars took care of that. Finally, there are some other issues that we don't want to go into detail on in the blog, but that have made life miserable.

Still, there were some blog posts that seem worth noting, so here I offer my top 10 blog posts for the year, in the order they appeared on the blog:

1. We started the year with two great days on the water.
   
2. I had fun with a little bit of fiction titled "This is Awkward," which became the inspiration for a writing project.
   
3. Tillerman issued a writing challenge to write a list, and I came up with ten lame or not-so-lame excuses not to get to the lake, triggered by a fit of pique at Zorro for letting me down the previous weekend.
   
4. I converted one of my better classroom lectures, on logical fallacies, into a blog post.
   
5. I issued a writing challenge to readers to come up with light bulb jokes about sailors, and the results were great.
   
6. In response to another Tillerman writing challenge, I wrote a review of the short film Pirates of the White Sand, a fun romp from the Duke City Shootout film festival.
   
7. I had another sailing experience with Zorro, involving moonlight under spinnaker and other such excitement.
   
8. Then, during National Novel Writing Month, I got to write a scene that recreated my first experience of an Etchells racing sailboat.
   
9. I noted a bit of irony over Thanksgiving weekend in Arizona.
   
10. I let my scholarly side out for a discussion of Plato's "Phaedrus."
    

So there you have it: the best of Five O'Clock Somewhere for 2009. Maybe next year there will be more fun things to choose from, and less gloom and doom.