So. How was 2006? Since I was lousy at updating here this year, I figured I’d write a brief year in review post. Not least because part of the reason I’m lousy at updating is my life is not really daily post exciting, and I’m running out of things to talk about.

2006 started off rather unusually for me, in that I really didn’t know what was going to happen. My life previous to this year was fairly planned in advance. 2005 was a major event year, with two major vacations, a move, and getting married all lined up in advance of New Year’s. 2004 was a little more unpredictable, with a new job and a proposal that I wasn’t anticipating, but I also moved that year and much of the year revolved around that – planning with Erin for our apartment, finding an apartment, moving into it, settling in, etc. 2003, I was still in school, which is always kind of predictable, and although the post-school life was a bit of a gaping maw, it still felt a little more predictable.

This year, though, I started the year without any major plans for my life. For the first time since 2002, I didn’t move in 2006. This was a significant life improvement, let me tell you – an entire year that didn’t feature a single box to be packed or unpacked, aside from presents that I mailed. (Those are the good kind of boxes to unpack.)

January was not a very exciting month. We were totally broke from Christmas (we’ve toned down somewhat this year in the hopes of not being quite so broke afterwards), and most of the month was spent bopping around at home. I went to visit Jana, briefly, for the first time in several months. But apart from that, January was pretty uneventful.

February, of course, featured the Knitting Olympics, which although it may not seem like a major event, was fairly pivotal. That was the point in time where I went from being a fairly enthusiastic knitter to a totally obsessive one. And given that I knit my first pair of socks during the Olympics, it was also the beginning of a slippery slope. I think, if my math is correct, that by the end of the year I will have made sixteen pairs of socks since February. That’s pretty good! (I’m no stariel, but it’s not too bad for my first year of sock knitting. I’m sure there will be more next year.)

The other major event of February was my much beloved Lucy’s death. I still try not to think about it too much, because it depresses the hell out of me and I miss her more than I care to admit. There was a brief moment last night, decorating my parents’ tree, that it hit me again, because Christmas has always featured Lucy as long as we’ve lived here. It’s strange and sad that this year, neither my sister nor my cat will be here on Christmas Day. Fortunately, my sister is coming the next day. I wish I could say the same for my kitty. I miss her.

In March, we went to Vancouver and Victoria to visit the various and sundry people who live there, which was quite delightful. I hadn’t been to Vancouver since my fourth year of university, and it was nice to be able to hang out there for a while. Jamie hadn’t been in even longer, and it was good to be able to go away for a fairly low key vacation.

April was the beginning of the Oilers playoff run that would consume the city and my family for two months. That’s really the only eventful thing that happened in April – it was not a very exciting month. May was much of the same – we started going down to Whyte Avenue after the games to enjoy the mayhem and just participate in one of those rare group insanity moments that are entertaining until people get stupid about it. (Flashing? Kind of amusing. Lighting stuffed sharks and ducks on fire? Probably dangerous, but still a fairly witty commentary. Lighting large fires out of things you found on the street? Less entertaining.)

June, of course, brought our trip to Britain, which was awesome. We were there for about three weeks, some of which overlapped with my family. There are actually a couple of entries about the trip (I know, it’s a miracle) here and here. It also brought the loss of the Oilers in game seven (which I’m still embarrassingly depressed about). Sigh.

July featured the tail end of our trip, the Exhibition where Jamie discovered that he can no longer handle spinny rides and nearly barfed more than once, which means he will be totally lame on the teacups in Disneyland and therefore can ride them with Jana, who is equally lame, and Ben (Jana’s husband) and I can have our own teacup and spin like maniacs, woo!

July is also when I began my ridiculous Christmas knitting list. I had a few other things to finish up (mostly socks), but the only non-Christmas gift I have knit since August was a Gryffindor tie for my Halloween costume. I feel like that’s pretty impressive, actually – I don’t usually have that kind of dedication. I can’t wait to be able to post about all the things I’ve knit, because I’ve learned a ton and my knitting has improved a LOT since the summer, so I should actually have some knitting content after Christmas. (Some of you are thrilled, and some of you are groaning, I’m sure.)

The main event of August was my brother-in-law’s wedding. This actually also took up a lot of July, as Jamie and I were extremely helpful and did a lot of legwork and moral support. I was also extremely useful on the day of and was greatly appreciated for my mad wedding planning skillz. I also decided that my Welsh relations should hire themselves out to come to weddings, because it wasn’t quite the same without them. (I am looking forward to my sister’s theoretical wedding for this exact reason, because I figure it’s the only other wedding I’ll get to go to with a bunch of my friends and all my excellent relations. And I should really write another entry about the rest of our wedding, because it was super awesome fun.)

Post-wedding, I went to visit Jana for a while and go on a yarn crawl, which was a nice break from the wedding madness. Then, all of a sudden, summer was nearly over and it was Fringe time, which featured meeting Nathan Fillion, among other things.

September featured a new laptop, Neville, who I am quite fond of but will probably never love like I loved Giles. It also mostly featured knitting that I can’t post about yet. (Why didn’t I do this post next week? Oh well. Next week maybe I’ll do a Knitting Year in Review.) It also featured a new job, which is about five minutes away from my house and very convenient. (It’s actually the same job, just in a different place.) I also chaperoned band camp for Jamie, which made me feel approximately eight hundred years old. (Damn kids.)

October rolled around and NaNoWriMo started to gear up, along with Socktoberfest. I did knit several socks in October, but I also discovered that the Edmonton NaNo community has become kind of insane, and planning NaNo is starting to get fairly time consuming. Thank god for Karen, who agreed to be my co-ML this year. We got things together, threw an awesome kick-off party, and then had an excellent November. October also started out with a super fun random road trip, in which Erin and I drove to Red Deer to meet up with Jana. We stayed in a Travelodge (in the Sleepy Bear Den, featuring creepy bears everywhere you looked. We got a free stuffed bear which has since become a running joke between all of us, where we try to hide Creepy Bear somewhere to freak the other out. He even came to Calgary with me at the end of the month and hid out in Jana's bathroom cupboard and in her bag.), and hung out and painted our nails and watched bad TV and I taught Jana how to knit. I had to talk Erin into coming, but we had an awesome time and we're planning to do it again at some point. It's amazing how getting out of town can improve your mood by so much, even if it's only an hour and a half away and you're staying in a random motel. I also went down to Calgary with Jamie, who had a conference there, and hung out with Jana and went yarn shopping and generally did very little besides read, knit, and hang out, and it was very restful.

November, of course, featured very little besides NaNoWriMo. There was a little bit of knitting when I was procrastinating, but mostly novelling and planning NaNo events, which I think actually took more time than the novel itself. I did, however, hit a personal word count record with over 70,000 words, but I think the novel isn’t great and I liked last year’s better. Oh well. Can’t win them all, I guess.

Jana and Ben did come and visit though, which was awesome. We went to the Waterpark and just generally had a very fun time. It was nice to see them when we weren’t scheduled for fifty thousand things – generally they come up for a wedding or something, so it was nice just to hang out. I think I've seen more of Jana this fall than I have since she moved away, and it's been awesome. They're coming up again next week for her cousin's wedding, and even though I'm working part of the time it will be great to see them. I'm going to go visit in January, partly to hang out but also to see their NEW PUPPY who looks insanely cute.

NaNoWriMo was very successful, and our Thank God It's Over party was also a big hit. It was nice to be able to reclaim our lives, though, and Karen and I both had a total non week the first week of December to recover.

December so far you're pretty much caught up with, since I've actually been updating. (Thanks, holidailies!) And now I just have to hope that the knitting is done in time (one thing has been abandoned as unrealistic, once I realised that I still have to WRAP all of these things!), buy a couple more gifts, and try to find the Christmas spirit that so far hasn't really hit me.

It's been a good year. Nothing very eventful (aside from our trip, I suppose), but I'm not really complaining. I like things to be mostly predictable. It doesn't make for thrilling blogging, but it makes for pretty good living. And these days, I'll take that. There was a point in my life where I'd have bitched that my life was boring, but now? Boring doesn't seem so bad.