I am participating in The Best of 2009 Blog Challenge.

1. Trip
I haven’t taken any trip-trips per se, but grocery shopping is called a trip to the store, right? So my favorite time of leaving the house this year was Independence Day. In the morning I was at the Brea Country fair, helping at a booth making sand stars. Then after lunch I hung around at the fair and got to hold various reptiles from Reptacular Animals and took my picture with Abraham Lincoln, who was visiting from a local museum, promoting a civil war exhibit. I don’t remember which museum, but I don’t think it was Brea Museum & Heritage Center. It was nearby though, perhaps Fullerton, La Habra, or possibly even Bowers Museum in Santa Ana.

The fair ended at 4p, at which point I headed to Long Beach for a boat party. That was a fun time of barbecue, fellowship, and watching the Queen Mary fireworks from the water. Two years previous, I saw those fireworks from the beach, so it was cool to see them from a different perspective.

2. Restaurant Moment
This is a hard one, because I always have such a great time when I go to restaurants with friends, but I think the best has to be when I went to Open Sesame for a friend’s “going-away” dinner. She didn’t want anything special, just dinner with me (we used to be roommates) and her two roommates, because another friend of ours has a going away party every time he leaves, but eventually comes back. She was only going on a summer study abroad program for a few weeks, then was coming back for a few days before leaving for the rest of summer, to return in fall. So you can see why she didn’t want to have a big to-do, but one of the girls secretly invited more girls, one of whom runs a party store in Hermosa Beach, and showed up with a balloon bouquet.

What made this dinner memorable is it included several of my favorite girls, and was at one of my favorite restaurants. It’s funny, because I forgot what I had exactly, but I know it was either the falafel pita sandwich or one of the chicken pita sandwiches. I didn’t get it this time, but if you ever go (a must if you find yourself anywhere near Long Beach, CA), I highly recommend the fried potatoes. The fried cauliflower is good too, as with everything on the menu. This is one of the very few places where I have a very hard time deciding what to order. Favorite restaurant + favorite people = it was a very good night in the middle of a stressful week (I was in the processing of moving).

3. Article
I think my favorite article this year is Baby Steps to Nutritious Eating by Passionate Homemaking. Lindsay nicely breaks down where to start in the daunting task of eating a real foods diet. This is something that any one can – and should! – give a shot. It’s a better approach that getting stuck in the MLM scheme of detox products. My husband wants to buy Isagenix, about which I’ve heard a lot of good reviews from people I know personally (who all happen to be financially well off) who have tried it, but I’ve also heard a lot of bad stuff. So I’d rather try to improve our eating habits the natural way first until we gather more information. At first, eating healthy seems overwhelming, but Lindsay here presents baby steps, which she suggests to take one at a time, of exchanging certain products here and there in your diet. A gradual approach is something people can accomplish and stick to.

4. Book
The best book I read this year was a historical fiction novel by Ann Rinaldi called Time Enough for Drums. I love all her books that I’ve read, but this one especially stood out and I do believe it is my favorite by her. It is set at the dawn of the American Revolution. Usually her books focus on a young girl connected to an actual figure in history, such as John Brown’s daughter,the slave of the Washingtons, Paul Revere’s daughter, or Abigail Adam’s indentured servant. The main characters in this book, however, are all fictional, but many of the background characters and people groups are real. The book covers a wider timespan, and I think this is the reason I like this the best. There is a lot more character development in this book than in others. Even though it’s history that draws me in, the characters are what make it a memorable story. I read a few of her books this year (all of which have to do with the revolutionary war, I was on a kick), but this one stuck out the most.

The Full Plate Diet was also good, but an informational/recipe book, so didn’t get consideration, even though it’s the only book I read that actually came out this year. Helper by Design looks promising, but I haven’t finished yet, so I can’t call it the best book of the year.

5. Night Out
It’s hard to pick a “best” anything, and this is probably one of the hardest categories, so I’m glad to pull my friend’s going-away dinner and the 4th of July boat party out of the running, since they already won. A lot of my favorite nights of the year perhaps would be considered “nights in,” where we went to someone’s house or people came to ours: Geek Night, Harry Potter movie nights, Reformation Party, Murder Mystery Party, video game night (actually this one was in a room at church that looks like a living room, so that’s “out”, right?). I’m looking through my Google calendar (which it appears I either didn’t use regularly until June or I had nothing to do – most likely the former) and am finding few actual night outs, including FreeView Thursday, which was an event in Long Beach where you could check out the cars before the Grand Prix that weekend, watch live events, and visit the shark lagoon at the aquarium all for free.

However, if a night out is truly memorable, one doesn’t need to check a calendar to remember it. So my favorite night out this year was my birthday. I felt like keeping it simple this year (was bummed I had to work and couldn’t go to Disneyland like everyone else and their mom). My husband and I went to Olive Garden at the Main Place Mall in Santa Ana and used a gift card we had gotten as a wedding present. I had never been, but had always wanted to since I love Italian food. I forget what I had, but it was delicious. Afterwards we went to a puppy store and played with the sweetest basset hound. It was so cute and when we are at a place where we are allowed to have dogs, that breed, or a mix thereof (as I would only adopt from a rescue) is a serious contender. Even though they howl at night. They are just so cute with their sad eyes and droopy ears. After that we saw Madagascar 2 in the dollar theatre, which was way funnier than the first (which was already hilarious).

I loved this birthday more than I ever thought I could love a simple birthday. It had so many favorites: my husband, pasta, puppies, and cartoons. Plus, it hardly cost anything, and I love frugality more than any of the aforementioned things, except my husband. So I didn’t get Disneyland, but it was not only my favorite night out of 2009, but one of my favorite birthdays (for now…by quarter centennial is coming up next month).

6. workshop or conference
I don’t really find myself at many workshops or conferences. I think the only one I attended was a DisciplePATH meeting at my church. DisciplePATH, previously known as TNET, is a ministry that trains churches to be disciplemaking churches. It was a two day conference. The speaker explained disciplemaking from the perspective of Jesus’ ministry, and went through the four stages/phases of disciplemaking. We spent half a day going through various passages of Scripture looking for examples of Jesus discipling others, and deciding what phase that would belong to. The goal is to create a church handbook for disciplemaking. There will be more meetings with the speaker, and many without, as the goal is to work as a church. The speaker would just be overseeing the process, with the future meetings with him acting as a checkpoint. So far there has only been one church meeting since, and I missed it. I think I had homework to finish. However, it was very edifying and an exciting prospect for growth in our church. If you attend a church that has this or something similar, I encourage you to participate. If not, I suggest presenting the idea to an elder or leader in the church

7. Blog Find of the Year
I’m pretty sure all the blogs I read regularly I’ve been reading since last year (best find of 2008 would definitely have to be MoneySavingMom) or sooner. I recently added a lot of blogs to my reading list, but they are all too new to me to pick a best. So I’ll choose the one blog that I started this year before this month: Just Images Don’t let the name fool you. While he does post photography, he writes about art and spirituality in general as well.

This one is mine (in Big Bear), but the aforementioned blogger takes lots of (way better) photos of sunsets at the Huntington Beach pier, so…it’s relevant.

These are just the prompts for December 1st-7th. I shall be posting the rest (or at least more, depending on the length) later this week.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 14th, 2009 at 10:34 pm and is filed under Best of 2009. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.