366 Days and 1 Second . . .

. . . Of one of the best, and also one of the worst, and definitely (tied for) the longest year of my life.

I'll start with the bad. There are certainly people worse off for it than myself, and many who it didn't phase at all, but this whole "worst financial crisis since the Great Depression" has certainly affected us. Due to the housing market, we were never able to sell or rent our condo in Fort Lauderdale, and due to the baby, we were not able to keep paying for it, so it was foreclosed on in November. We're still living with Abee's parents, though we're more used to it now, and definitely thankful to have such great family members to help us out.

The other bad thing, due to what happened in the oil market, the airline industry pretty much crashed this year. Growth at my company came to a screeching halt, and then slid back some. I would have made captain this year, finally making some decent income in this industry, but I'm still a first officer. Again, I'm thankful that I do have a job, and not at square one again like I was in 2002.

However, to all you speculators who made a killing exploiting South Florida residents and oil consumers by driving the prices up, I hope you weren't able to save a dime.

So yeah, from an economic standpoint, this was a terrible year. Other than that, I have to say it was pretty great. I started off with a New Year's party with my friends Ken and Pat in San Francisco. They had a place on Treasure Island, and at midnight we could see the fireworks over the San Francisco skyline across the bay.

Another nice thing is that, when the growth stopped at my company, I ended up being stuck as a fairly senior first officer. This means that while I still don't make much money, I pretty much have my pick as far as schedules go. I managed to get off nine days in a row in July so I could go to Wisconsin with my family for the first summer in many years. In November I was able to string together vacation, ground school, and normal days off to get 18 days at home in a row. Then for the holidays I was able to string together a bunch of days off at the end of December and the beginning of January, so I basically have my own Christmas vacation this year.

And then of course there was Adelaide. Despite all the crap that happened this year (and I left a bunch of it out; didn't want to sound too whiny), having Adelaide overshadowed it all and will always make 2008 be a great year in my memory.

Then there's the "longest" part. The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service has added a "leap second" to this year, due to the fact that the planet does not always keep perfect time with atomic clocks. There is an interesting Wikipedia article on it here. There have been many other leap seconds, but the only other time in my life this happened on a leap year as well was 1990, way back when "Ice Ice Baby" was the #1 song and I, being all of 11 years old, decided for sure that I was going to grow up to be a pilot. That was a pretty good year in my memory as well.

Now that I think of it, since I started this year on Pacific Time and will be ending it on Eastern Time, I am actually losing three hours of 2008, so 1990 was definitely the longest, but this was the second longest year.

Well, it looks like I'm babbling again, so I guess it's time to go.

Happy New Year!!