I can’t believe I thought a two-part entry over two days was a good idea. It’s indulgent and rather dull. I reread yesterday’s entry and good lord, I’m sorry. I hope you didn’t go reread old stuff.Also in rereading, I realized that maybe I should revise my theme to reflect the most fun I had in 2008. Hell, I could just about whittle it down to the best music moments of the year, since in my world they’re one and the same. I feel guilty that there isn’t more about my family in my year-end highlights. Suffice it to say that while they are as challenging as any other family, our day-to-day is pretty damn awesome, to the point where it tends to not register as being extraordinary. This is good.

Not that any of this is going to stop me from continuing. So it’s back to July we go.

July – Chasing Nels Cline around Missouri and Tennessee with Maggie.

Yep, more music. So much fun I couldn’t remember what day it was! The details are hazy, too. It involved avant surfcore jazz, one of the best guitarist of the modern era, more sweet potato pancakes, and Maggie getting her pants stuck around her thighs.

Brian, me, Maggie, Tammy, and Fred, outside the questionable Mexican joint in Columbia where we ate after the Columbia, MO, show. Several members of our party went on to give birth to bad burrito babies.

(You can see a brief clip from the Nashville show if you click here.)

August: August sort of blew. It was hot. I spent half the month with various stages of the flu. At least the flu struck a few hours after something really cool: before I threw up curly fries, I went to the reception for my friends Summer and Julie’s first art exhibit. They’re both photographers, and their first exhibit was down the street from my house. When I wasn’t dying of gut, I spent a lot of time around their awesome work, and with them. Not that I actually blogged about it.

One day in August that didn’t suck: running through the Missouri Botanical Gardens’ Niki exhibit with Clara Jane. The kid’s becoming an art geek, which thrills me to no end.

Clara Jane, smooching a lion sculpture.

September: My baby started school!

Well, preschool at the school she’ll attend for the next nine years. She loves it and is thriving, both intellectually and socially. She’s thrived so well that she doesn’t think she needs parental assistance. Sometimes I think she might be right.

Clara Jane, all uniformed up for her first day at school.

October: I turned 36 and no one died or was maimed!

Any birthday I celebrate with the same number of people in my life as I had the day before my birthday is a good one. Not only did I go to a kick-ass Old Crow Medicine Show concert with Courtney that night (thanks to KDHX for freebie tickets). When I returned home, there was rainbow cake, baked by Brian and designed by Clara Jane.

Oh! And I completed a 50-page writing challenge and got started on a novel. Not that I’ve touched it since October, but I’m 50 pages closer than I was a year ago.

Cake designer and icing thief.

November: Thanksgiving, with a chunk of my family coming to visit.

I don’t remember much, since I was zonked on cough syrup through most of it, but I remember having lots of fun with The Cuz, Amelia, Riley-pants, and Boy Cuz, making a kick-ass Thanksgiving dinner, and doing two of Grandpa Chuck’s favorite things: Christmas lights and parades. It’s about a perfect as a family holiday gets. Well, aside from the phlegm. And the vomiting. Might not seem like it, but I have a good family that’s healthy and loving enough to trek to Prettytown, which gives me lots to be thankful for.

Wendy, Travis, and me – an entire generation on my ma’s side of the family. We’re probably getting ready to do something stupid. We usually are.

December: It’s too damn early to pick. Philly. Christmas. Bottle Rockets. It was all pretty darn good. Even if some trees fell, as trees are bound to do in life. Consider the needles swept and we’re off to the next big thing.