2008 in Review/November-December

I noticed yesterday was my 400th post...a milestone of sorts in about 1 1/2 years. #401 will be a last look and the last one for 2008...at the bottom, my outlook/hopes for 2009.


Another windy day...but this one rather than being warm and windy is cold and pretty raw, with snow flurries from time to time. Tomorrow for our Indiana Fest it looks about 'normal' for January 1st...30 degrees, but no snow or ice in the forecast for a few days.....



November-December 2008
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For the first decade after we returned to Ohio in 1980, Patricia, I, and the kids, as they came along, would trade Christmas and Thanksgiving between Ohio with my family and Wisconsin, with hers. One year Christmas here, one there....during the 1990s we decided that Christmas weather with a car full of kids was to risky with bad weather and heavy traffic, so we would spend Thanksgiving driving to and from Wisconsin...Christmas we would spend here and Thanksgiving at the lake near Oconomowoc.


This year, after a decade of fighting traffic in and around Chicago on Thanksgiving, we came to the conclusion that any kind of driving around the Chicago Tollway area was a lost cause on Holidays....so we headed up 2 weeks before Turkey Day....probably not fair to Patricia's folks, but, since she and Anissa go up for a week during the summer anyway, it saves us the headaches of travel around the land of corruption called Chicago, which is bad anytime, but especially so around Thanksgiving and Christmas.


November 4th of course saw the beginning of our coming National Nightmare...that being the election of one Barry Obama as 44th President of these United States. The GOP offered the usual warmed over RINO, John McCain, and with the economy in the shitter, Obama was given a free pass by the voters and the media...it was his for the taking, and he did. 2009 won't be pretty.


I basically turned towards my basketball classes and scored high enough(as did oldest son Sam) to get my license in high school basketball officiating, making this my 3rd and final sport that I will be licensed in. Once secure, I filled out my schedule. Being a long time baseball and football official, it was easy to fill my basketball schedule with area Athletic Directors, they know me fairly well, and getting the contracts were not hard....let's hope I can live up to their trust.



With the coming Obama Administration, many fans of our 2nd Amendment, for good reason, believe a gun/ammo grab are not far away....Democrats, Liberals, and in particular Obama, hate guns in the hands of law abiding citizens, especially citizens that might actually fight back against a tyrannical government. That was one reason my friend Rick, his youngest son Guy, and I, decided to meet at Fort Wayne the end of November, for the final Gun Show of 2008....by the time we got there on the second day, the ammo had been picked over, and the handguns, and even the rifles and shotguns were priced pretty high....another show coming up January 3rd...I expect them to be worse, prices that is. Even with the grim outlook, we had a good time, and I plan on heading over Saturday for 2009 show #1.


December----we have had our share of ice, but not much snow to speak of so far in this final month of '08'. Lucky for us, most of the ice storms have been followed by a warm up, so it doesn't stick around long. On a personal front, right after the regular basketball season began, I came down with my first bad cold in years....and it has stuck around for the duration of the month. In sad news, my first cousin Gary Houseworth, the only other surviving Houseworth male, besides Mike and me, from dad or his brothers, passed away at his home in Venice, Florida, just days before his 62nd Birthday....Gary and I had been roommates back in the early 1970s...before he headed back to our childhood home in Venice. Earlier my buddy Eddie Bonifus of Coldwater, Ohio, passed away after a long battle with cancer...Eddie and I had joined the Air Force together on the "Buddy System" in the summer of 1968.


Patricia made her usual batch of 60 dozen or so home baked cookies, the back yard Marsh Hawk returned for visits, trying to catch the feeding sparrows, and the nations economy went in the tank, with Bush helping Democrats push us into hard core Socialism, and tax payer funded bail outs, which our kids and their kids will never be able to pay back......the economy is in deep trouble, as are we as a nation, with the likes of Obama, Reid, and Pelosi, in charge.....meanwhile "The One" in the name of change appointed Clinton retread after retread to his cabinet.




Christmas at sister Marty's house went well...with almost all the immediate family on hand....after that older brother Mike took mom to Florida for the winter, to stay with youngest sister Kelly and her husband.

New Year's Eve....Patricia and I will keep it at home...we stopped going out an fighting the hangovers and drunk drivers years ago...If lucky we might stay up until Midnight, but seriously, I doubt it! Tomorrow, along with Clint, and maybe Hal, I will head the 60 miles north and west to Rick's house, where we will eat, drink, and fire up a couple cigars, while watching football.......then maybe I'll think about dropping the 15 pounds I've put on over the past 2 years....that, like everything else, gets harder as the years pass.

A look at 2009.......

I turn 60, if God is willing, come March 16th. I have to believe that with the new Socialists coming to power in Washington, we will be in for a rough ride....the hand outs and bail outs will be in full bloom, and our individual freedoms will be sacrificed. I hear so-called Conservatives claim to want President Obama to be successful...NOT I! He is a Socialist/Marxist....I want no part of his type of "Change" and hope he fails miserably....I don't want my kids to be left with his type of hope and debt...he is a dangerous phony, his followers are sheep.

Sounds harsh doesn't it? So be it....I think America will look much different in the next months and years....we have been falling slowly into a moral and economic valley for years, the likes of our new leaders will send us deeper and faster into just that.

So, that's my opinion, and my personal look back at 2008....I plan on being around in 2009 for better or worse, and give you my views.

Have a great New Year, and my God Bless you all.

back in 2009>>>>>>>>





photos-A salute to Obama and his Kool-Aid Drinking
lemmings. Basketball is sport #3. The parking lot in front of the Fort Wayne Coliseum and inside at the Gun Show on November 30th. Ice hangs off the lines and limbs outside our house. A batch of Patricia's Christmas Cookies....

And a Happy New Year to all......