What a great year. What a wild year. What a fantastic and crazy 365 days, all strung together like super-charged Christmas lights after one too many mocha lattes. Dizzying. Merry Christmas 2008, you were a year to remember — one I won’t soon forget. How could I? So many things happened. Celebrating my 10-year wedding anniversary, and days later impaling my thigh on a surfboard that left me on crutches for 5 weeks and nerve-damage to this day. My 3-year-old started sewing words together into elaborate and complex sentences that sometimes went somewhere, and other times didn’t. One minute she sounds like a genius and the next you wonder if maybe the oxygen isn’t reaching the top floor. Either way, the girl doesn’t know how to use a period — she’s one long run-on sentence. We had two 10-year anniversaries, as this year also marked a decade with a little black mongrel of a dog named Chase. Ten years of a dog who sheds hair like a 4-month-old Christmas tree.

“What are you making?” my wife asked as she walked into the kitchen one morning earlier this week. Her nose was twitching and her eyes were squinted like she was looking straight into the sun. I had taken the week off to attend to odd jobs around the house and general pre-Christmas festivities with my daughter. This little morning project in the kitchen was one of those odd jobs — part of a Christmas present idea I had for the crew in my office. Why buy them something meaningless when I could offer them a gift from the heart that I had labored over — a sign of thanks for all they do. And if it didn’t kill them, all-the-better. On the stove was what could only be described as a simmering pot of crude oil that gave off a strong aroma not quite recognizable. Assorted bowls, containers and spoons lay around the cutting board. This was the scene that my wife was trying to make sense of that morning. By the look on her face I figured it best to just avoid her question altogether and go about my stirring. Exercising the Fifth Amendment is one of my favorite Christmas traditions. “Kahlua?!?” she finally said to break the silence. “You’re running a distillery and it’s not even 8 a.m.?”

It’s not Thanksgiving unless there’s a calamity in the kitchen, and in most cases it involves fire. Or knives. Or flaming knives with a highly toxic, salmonella-ridden turkey. How festive. My family went to my mother’s house in Tampa this Thanksgiving. I got the holiday rolling the night before when at dinner I said to my mother, “So obviously you heard about Scott (my brother) breaking his foot while riding his motorcycle.” Apparently it wasn’t so obvious. She hadn’t heard. “What?!?” she yelled. “Why doesn’t anyone tell me anything?” I know how to start things off at family gatherings. My brother came in the next morning hobbling on a crutch with a big black boot on his foot. I thought my mother might break his other foot. So began a typical Thanksgiving at my house. But that wasn’t the cause of the fire. The flames didn’t come until closer to lunch. I actually missed it. My aunt had forgotten the wine and we were dispatched for alcohol while food was hitting the serving trays. If Thanksgiving dinner isn’t so cold that it induces frostbite when you eat it, then you know you’re doing something wrong.

I don’t know how old my little hound dog is. All I know is we just celebrated 10 years with her — a truly special animalversary. Chase, the dog, got a fish stick with a lit candle in it. OK, that’s pretty sad for such a special occasion, but the dog sure was excited and everybody knows the firstborn gets somewhat forgotten once the secondborn comes along. But what it lacked in pomp and circumstance was sure made up for in memories of 10 wonderful years. A dog can bring such joy to a family, and my goofball of an animal has certainly done that. It’s kind of incredible that it was a decade ago that my wife and I trekked off to the Humane Society in search of a K9. We had been married just a few months and found ourselves in a house of our own. So why not ruin it with an animal who might chew up the furniture and cause smells like a cross between a high school locker room and a cow barn? We strolled down the enclosures looking for the right dog, trying to sort out in a glance who would make the perfect lifelong companion. I know I would have loved any animal we had picked, but I also know my life would not have been as rich without Chase.

Something just occurred to me recently: There has actually been other news going on in the world besides the election. I just realized this. Did you know? There are, believe it or not, journalists out there writing stories about people and events that don’t have anything to do with Obamas, McCains or electoral colleges. Weird, huh? Apparently no one told them an election was going on, and the world didn’t go on hiatus. For, I don’t know, the past two years I’ve been like many Americans who were glued — and maybe even addicted — to election coverage. It’s all we read, watched and talked about. It became an obsession. And then, just like that, it ended. It went away, abandoning our need for 24-hour election coverage. Now we have to find a way to go on without it. But how? Someone show us the way? It’s been tough adjusting to life after the election. No more polls to check, no more stories to read about the state of the race, and no more guessing about the score of the game after the final whistle. The political E-mails have all dried up, and it’s back to the former non-sense like videos of dancing cats or people getting hit in their private areas by stray objects. Well, OK, so that’s a little like politics, but still it’s not the same.

Thumb abuse is real. It’s not just something you read about in newspapers or see on TV shows. It happens, pretty often. I’m living proof. Or my thumb is. It looks a bit like a miniature eggplant — a shade of purple so alien it’s found nowhere in nature. Maybe a lollipop, but not nature. And it’s throbbing. It’s throbbing and I can hear it. It sounds like, “I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.” It’s referring to me. How did it happen? How does it ever happen? Idiot with a hammer. Bad eye-hand coordination. No gloves on. Idiot was on roof getting tired and careless. Truth be told, I was probably thinking of cold beer and beef jerky. I lost my concentration and whacked that stub of thumb with a hammer swing that could have broken rocks. SMACK! The pain was otherworldly. It felt like a stick of dynamite going off in my hand. It was one of those silent scream pains where you mouth it, but just can’t get it out. Your mouth jerks open wide and squirrels check you over considering whether to build a nest in there. In another dimension, people wondered about the blood-curdling cry they heard.

It was stunning. There I was, glued to the couch, flipping the television from my Tampa Bay Buccaneers — a team I love, even though they caused me the kind of agony as a child that can only be matched by SUV-sized kidney stones — to watch a baseball game. Baseball? Are you kidding? What’s happened to me?!? I’m not a baseball fan. I never watch baseball. I’ve watched tricycle races and world championship ice fishing, but I can’t ever think of an occasion where I’ve flipped on a baseball game. It’s not my sport — too slow, too much spitting, not enough action, and I don’t really like any sports where you have to button-up your uniform. That’s far too sophisticated for me. My two sports are football and futbol (aka. soccer), and I rarely watch anything else. But as a Tampa native, my interest was piqued when the Tampa Bay Rays made the playoffs. Suddenly I was interested in this sport, and this young, ragged, bottom-dwelling team that had dispatched giants all season. So I tuned in. And daggonit if I’m not hooked. Maybe it’s my Cuban roots. Cubans will give up air before they’ll give up baseball, and I’ve heard relatives tell me doctors will use catchers mitts when delivering babies. Baseball is a passion in Cuba — a religion. On my first trip there as a journalist several years back, I took a bunch of baseballs to give away to kids. You would have thought I […]