Today is the last day of 2008. Wow!<\/p>\n
It’s been a pretty good year.<\/p>\n
I moved out of a very stressful marriage in February.\u00a0 It was just too stressful and depressing with Mark and his fiance there in the same house.\u00a0 While I do miss the house itself, I *do not* miss the headaches.\u00a0 Eck!<\/p>\n
It also brought me back to\u00a0 church and have enjoyed the sermons and fellowship since then.\u00a0 It was something I was not allowed to attend while with Mark.\u00a0 Not only did I attend a new congregation, but also a denomination, United Methodist.\u00a0 While I’m still a member of the United Church of Christ<\/a>, I have enjoyed UM… it is *very* similar to UCC.<\/p>\n March was another Smothers Brothers concert at the Strawberry Festival… outside….in the rain (I’m a hard core SmoBro fan. Rain does not bring me down from one of their concerts). It was my 6th concert of theirs and even though I mouthed the words to the songs and comedy routines, I loved it!\u00a0 Kristi also came with me.\u00a0 She had never been to a concert before. Well, she went to a Blues Clues Live show when she was 3.\u00a0 But she was curious to see them live because she knew I was a huge fan.\u00a0 Mom also went with us and when it started raining, she took Kristi to a covered area and brought her back when it stopped.<\/p>\n The month of May brought the finalization of the divorce. My marriage to Mark lasted just over 10 years.\u00a0 Two wonderful things that came out of it was Kristi and Katie.<\/p>\n May also got me started on regularly (almost) attending Father Roderick’s uStream chatroom<\/a>.\u00a0 In the beginning he had his web cam on almost 24\/7, but after a while he switched it to just when he records his podcasts (Check out SQPN<\/a> if you haven’t already!\u00a0 Although the podcasts are all Catholic, you don’t have to be Catholic to enjoy them, just like you don’t have to have an iPod to listen to podcasts :)).\u00a0 And with his popularity with regular listeners and being on the front page of uStream a number of times, he made a few people moderators to help take care of a few random troublemakers that would pop up.\u00a0 And to my surprise he made me one of those moderators!<\/p>\n August I got another surprise this year from another one of my favorite podcasters, Cliff Ravenscraft<\/a>.\u00a0 He created a podcast network, GSPN<\/a>.\u00a0 One of several podcasts he does is Family From the Heart<\/a> and on one episode he was giving away a signed abridged audiobook CD.\u00a0 I was on his live page<\/a> chatting with others while watching Cliff and his wife Stephine and he said the next person who called in would win the audiobook.\u00a0 I waited a few seconds and casually opened my phone, dialed the number, and then I hear Cliff’s voice on the other end!\u00a0 So I made an appearance on another one of his shows (he interviewed me last year<\/a>). And winning that CD was very cool \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n August brought about this version of my site.\u00a0 I do like it better. More dynamic content than my other versions which would remain static for a couple years at a time.<\/p>\n October was meeting John Green. I already wrote about that<\/a>. That was awesome!<\/p>\n And December was attending a small but fun, SQPN get-together with Deb and Fr. Bill Kessler<\/a> at EPCOT!\u00a0 I have an upcoming post and pictures from that so I won’t go into to much detail about that other to say it was a lot of fun :).<\/p>\n What will 2009 bring? I don’t know, but I have a good feeling about it :).<\/p>\n\n