Happy New Year!

After the last two years, it's a weird feeling to not be in Vegas for New Year's Eve. Not a good weird, a bad weird. However, I'm not a negative guy. I can find a few upsides to being Vegas-free this December 31: my wallet actually contains money; I slept more than 45 minutes last night; I don't feel the need to take 3 showers to get the smell of stripper raspberry body spray off of me; and when I burp it doesn't taste like white russian mixed with egg mcmuffin mixed with margarita by the yard. Hi-yooooo!

This year I will not be resolving to do anything differently, because it never seems to end well for me. One year I resolved to stop drinking pop, and I made it to about mid-March, then snapped and ended up taking down a case of Dewskis in about 2 1/2 hours. Another year I resolved to stop taking sports so seriously, and I was doing OK until KU lost in the championship game, Roy left for North Carolina, and the Sox blew an 8th inning lead in Game 7 of the ALCS, all in a seven-month span, which resulted in me being crazier than ever before. Thanks, Sports Gods. Yet another year I resolved to stop cursing, and you can fucking see how fucking well that's worked out for me. Fuck.

I've grown up a quite a bit during 2007 in the traditional sense (moving away from my hometown, getting a big kids' job, throwing away my life-size cutout of Princess Leia, etc. etc. etc.) But even though I'm now 25, me and my friends are still pretty good at, as Sara H. so eloquently puts it, "acting like we're 20 with a fake i.d." Here are some of my favorite days of the year, represented by the following photos....

Lane and Skye's wedding. Skye, I give you props for going through with that wedding. The sexual tension that was flying around the room while we were raising the roof was crazy intense. I was surprised you didn't call it off and run away with me right there.

The infamous limo trip to Shooting Star Casino. From the looks of this picture, this was approximately 2.7 seconds before I puked in the garbage bag. I can only assume that Bergman held my hair back for me. Thanks, dude.

The last Culligan party. This doesn't paint the best portrait of that night, but I like this picture for two reasons: 1) Shawn is REALLY angry about something that just happened in his Flippy Cup game, and he is expressing that anger by putting both hands on his hips in an aggressive manner; and 2) if you look very closely on our question of the week board, you can read the beauty that Horp left for us the previous summer before he moved to Phoenix. If you can't see it, it reads: Take care fellas (and April) P.S. I peed on the middle cushion - please no questions!

Needless to say the question of the week was retired after that, and that stayed up for over a year.

And I don't really mean to pick on Shawn so much with these pictures, so I apologize. Here's a better one...

Ohhh shit!!! Whoops I accidentally posted one of a guy who got arrested for robbing multiple 7-11s back in 1992. My bad, Shawn-0. OK for real this time...

Lindsey and Shawn's wedding. A lovely ceremony, and an absolutely crazy dance. One of those wedding dances where all of sudden it's the last dance, and you look around and the happy couple is right there enjoying "Open Arms" by Journey right along with you. I was still up at 8 am the next morning, chilling in the pool area in the middle of all the rooms, and lemme tell ya, there were PLENTY of people doing the walk of shame back to their rooms. Really a lot of hustle there, I loved it. Good stuff.

Not to be outdone, just one week later: Anthony and Erica's wedding. I already talked about this one in more detail here. Thumb-diddley!

The Boston trip in July was great. It was the fourth game at Fenway for T. Nels and I, and Alex and Kristen's first. In the process we met French and Lauren, hopefully proving to others that meeting people via the internet doesn't have to end with Dateline NBC busting you while you're eating home-made chocolate chip cookies, drinking Mike's Hard Lemonade, and waiting for a 14-year-old girl to change into her bikini so you can go in the hot tub. I chose this picture from the trip because (hopefully you can see that we are in front of Cheers here) and as we were posing, a car drove by and someone shouted, "They don't know your name!!!" Well played, stranger in a speeding car. Well played.

I suppose now that French has put me on the spot in his blog, I have to do a year-in-sports review. All right, dude. You're the boss.