As I sit here and try to summerize a year that has been one of the most extremes in history it boggles the mind to see how crappy this year was. Musicwise, it was perhaps the worst in terms of new music. The final tally was 69 albums reviewed this year, I reviewed 92 last year, 122 in 2006. Can't blame it all on illegal downloading with all the majors did was release crap after crap album this year, and nobody bought much of anything. The new Guns And Roses album has been a bust, moving only 220,000 copies. That's pretty bad for something that was hyped up after 17 years of waiting for it, and going to Best Buy to hear it, it deemed a waste of time and line to even comment on it. Looks like future rock and roll hall of famer Kanye West will have the top spot.
The year started out crappy with the 2nd most snowiest winter on record to which I was sick most of the first two months of this year. And then we ended up getting one of the wettest spring on record. Rained every day it seemed starting in April, melting that 59 inches of the white crap and each of the next three months, ended up having water in the basement every other weekend. And then, the Parkersburg/New Hartford tornado wiped out half the area around highway 20, and then two straight weekends of 10 inch rainfall and the Cedar River wiped out most of downtown Cedar Rapids. 31 feet of raging Red Cedar, and Czech Village was history. And five months later, parts of CR remain a warzone although there is hope with the opening of Sav A Lot and Erine's in Czech Village but it's a long way to go. The Wapsipinicon River wasn't too kind either, moving up to 26 feet in Anamosa and doing a bit of damage there too. Basically, we didn't have much of a summer here, since everybody had to clean up all the flood damage around the floodplains. Had I still lived in the old Broadcast Manor Duplex on N Street, I'm sure we would have lost most of what we got. Looking at the river now, it's hard to fathom 31 feet of angry river, since the rains finally let up around August and we managed to stayed dry.
It was a bad year for driving here. I blew out three tires and on a trip to Madison, one of the replacement tires got a knot on the sidewall so had to replaced that. On top of having the transmission repaired and now having a leaking brakeline, I'm hoping the car will survive another winter, I'd rather not buy a new car, only to have it being rusted out by all the salt and winter crap due to our first snowfall already this year.
In August, my best friend's house caught on fire and they lost two cats in the smoke. But at least their dogs survived and the only cat that did survived the fire was Smokey who was outside on the prowl. Earlier in the month, one of our maple trees split apart and took out what remained of our raspberry plants (which we lost when we had to put a new septic system couple years ago) and then the next week, I was outside and seen the other part of the tree split and took out more fence. We lost part of another tree due to a icestorm earlier in the year but I sit and wonder if the other side of that tree will fall and take out part of the neighbor's house next door. Hope to God that doesn't happen anytime soon.
This year we also seen our greedy government run us all into debt. Gas prices driven by speculators and greedy bastards raised the price up to an ungodly 4.19 a gallon by summer. And then the bottom fell out. It's now at 1.69 a gallon but with jobs cuts left and right, nobody did much driving in these times. These are dark times but with Obama becoming president, he has to undo the shite that the Bush cronies got us into. It's been a two year depression actually, but it took everybody till October to finally see that things were not going well. And now we have to bailout the overpaid CSers at Wall Street and I think we got taken. I see it when I turn on a soccer game and see some team being sponsered by AIG. Money well spent, not.
So, as I try to assess the final observation of this year, I don't have a favorable opinion of this year. It sucked from day one and the sooner this year ended the better. As the month moves on, I'll try to find some highlights.
But not now.
