Cheers to 2006

As everyone in Chicago gets ready for the Bears/New Year's Simultaneous Party Fiasco, I wanted to wish you all a wonderful new year - hope 2007 is twice as good as 2006.

For my hometown, here are a couple of interesting stories from 2006.

For myself, a couple of brief images I remember from 2006:


- Getting a bottle of "The Admiral" as a cruel present down at ISU.

- "You wanna McWrestle?" - I had a funny sense of confidence confronting an intruder, on my birthday at Durty Nellie's.

- Hearing "clam-jacked" on the radio

- Walking 3 miles from the United Center before realizing we were a LONG way from Kingston Mines.

- Playing tour guide, host, and friend for a visitor over the summer.

- Taking the DC boys downstate for baseball - and goin' "out on the town" in beautiful Joliet, IL with a high-class bunch of baseball coaches.

- "I don't even KNOOW what you're talking about." - another birthday treasure that came during the confrontation with the stranger. Apparently he thought we were dissin' his lady. This phrase ended up living on for like, oh, how many months after?

- Seeing Australian Soccer hooligans for the first time - at a dive bar in Reno, Nevada with Sachs.

- Seeing the same hooligans dancing around on top of pool tables in the same bar - sans pants, moments later.

- Being the only person on earth to soak their phone and wallet in beer, then run as fast as possible and throw them both down 11 stories into a trash chute. If you don't know the story behind that - I'm sure I'll eventually publish it.

- Playing a round of golf with a man who was legally blind, had a block foot, and wore a rainbow pinwheel hat. For 3 hours. For only 8 holes.

- Watching another man try to save his clubs from rolling into a lake, and subsequently slipping and falling ass first into the lake.

- Hitting my best 4-iron of my life, 198 yards just short and right of the pin in the fringe, but was especially amazing considering it was on a hole with all sand to the right of the green, all lake in front of the green, and a graveyard right behind the green. It was my first and only successful attempt at navigating ghosts on the course.

- a rockin' show at LPZoo.

- 3 folding tables, one turkey, 6 family members, one studio apt. = thanksgiving dinner

- deciding it would be a good idea to try to get 4 jobs in one year.

- getting trucked playing pickup hoops before work, and leaving the emergency room 2 hours later with 8 stitches and a rediculous scar.

- doing about 10 public speaking engagements looking like frankenstein with those damn stitches

- michigan football weekend - family's first game and seeing us whup the badgers

- 6 hilarious hours of freezin cold baseball alumni weekend golf. Seeing Ali Husain slioe a shot 50 yards away from the hole, then look back at everyone laughing and saying "Hey I know, lets have a pizza making contest!" - possibly the funniest line of the year.

- The kid, Rosey, Leif, Zach, Lentz, Dooch, and a whole loaf of "Holla" - or however its spelled

- First year of life where I wasn't a baseball player. I didn't turn into a pumpkin.