Sunday, January 1
The best of 2005
Now, remember, your correspondent lives on the edge of nowhere, so his access (particularly to movies and live music) is fairly mainstream and limited. With that caveat, here's my rankings of the top five of 2005:
Movies: A year of big events and fairly high expectations and for once I must say I wasn't disappointed by any of the movies I saw: Wallace & Grommit; Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, King Kong, Harry Potter & the Fourth Film; Star Wars Ep III. I even liked The Hitchhikers Guide the Galaxy. I'll add to this list the eight or nine snippets of work by my son.
Concerts: Again, we didn't see that many. Topping my list is the dozen or so times we saw our son and the 6 or 8 times we saw our daughter perform. Beyond those 20 concerts, however, here's the Top Five (well, the only 5 we saw) concerts we saw last year: Green Day, Mark O'Connor's Hot Swing Trio, Jimmy Eat World, Bobby McFerrin, , Bela Fleck and Edger Meyer and several jazz concerts by a local outfit featuring Dana Landry, Eric Applegate and Jim White out of Greeley and their friends
Television: The Office and My Name is Earl are the only two newish shows I watched. Otherwise, enjoyed Curb Your Enthuiasm, the Simpsons, Most Extreme Elimination and, of course, laughed too much at funny home videos.
Dog shows (as if anyone but I care): We hit the dog show circuit with Westley for the first time, and these were the five best: Greeley, Kansas City, Brighton, Denver and Fort Collins.
Local restaurants: I found myself eating out most often at Daz Bog, the Border's Cafe, Abo's, Qdoba, Red Robin and Noodles. Remember, I live on the edge of nowhere with two teen-agers. It shapes everything.
Movies: A year of big events and fairly high expectations and for once I must say I wasn't disappointed by any of the movies I saw: Wallace & Grommit; Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, King Kong, Harry Potter & the Fourth Film; Star Wars Ep III. I even liked The Hitchhikers Guide the Galaxy. I'll add to this list the eight or nine snippets of work by my son.
Concerts: Again, we didn't see that many. Topping my list is the dozen or so times we saw our son and the 6 or 8 times we saw our daughter perform. Beyond those 20 concerts, however, here's the Top Five (well, the only 5 we saw) concerts we saw last year: Green Day, Mark O'Connor's Hot Swing Trio, Jimmy Eat World, Bobby McFerrin, , Bela Fleck and Edger Meyer and several jazz concerts by a local outfit featuring Dana Landry, Eric Applegate and Jim White out of Greeley and their friends
Television: The Office and My Name is Earl are the only two newish shows I watched. Otherwise, enjoyed Curb Your Enthuiasm, the Simpsons, Most Extreme Elimination and, of course, laughed too much at funny home videos.
Books: This one's harder, because I didn't read too many new releases, and of course reading is so personal. But here (I think, at least for today, this moment) are the best books I ready last year, in random order: U & I by Nicholson Baker; Chronicles by Bob Dylan, The Twenty-seventh City by Jonathan Franzen, Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer and The Diviners by Rick Moody. I read several Baker books, and I liked 'em all, but none stands out more than this one for me. Dylan's a good storyteller and he was certainly there in the middle of it all. Franzen's book may have been the best one I read, most complete and lacking in any caveats. I like two-thirds of Foer's book an awful lot, but I want to scan other parts (disclosure: I started reading this in April from the library, and quit in one of the (to me) boring sections; then I bought a paperback on the 3 for 2 table at Borders in mid-summer, and last week started reading it again so I'm not quite finished yet....). And I really liked the ambition in Moody's book, but it took me almost three months to read it because I kept putting it down, so it hads its problems.
Trips: Norway. Nothing else we did compares to nearly three weeks in Norway, not the weekend drive to Kansas City for a dog show, not the three business trips to Arizona, not the trip to Ohio for my aunt's memorial service and not the day trips to the mountains or Denver, not even the Pikes Peaks Writer's Conference last April.
Dog shows (as if anyone but I care): We hit the dog show circuit with Westley for the first time, and these were the five best: Greeley, Kansas City, Brighton, Denver and Fort Collins.
Local restaurants: I found myself eating out most often at Daz Bog, the Border's Cafe, Abo's, Qdoba, Red Robin and Noodles. Remember, I live on the edge of nowhere with two teen-agers. It shapes everything.
