One Big Library.

Funny how sometimes the story of a year plays out in the photos you choose to share.

This is how it started.

Happy new year, indeed. This is what I'd done:

Broken fifth metacarpal. It healed okay, I think.

I spent the better part of January and February healing up from the hand and serving on a DC grand jury. No pictures of that. There was one major highlight in that period, though:

What a day! Broken as I was (the hand, and my back had gone wonky a few days before inauguration) and cold as it was I'll never regret being there, it was one of the most exciting things I've ever seen.

I must've started feeling better by the end of February.

Though maybe I was just being foolish.

Manon caught in the act, with her new camera:

I've grown to prefer shooting black and white film. Here's the red filter in action:

And again with the red filter. It's still hard sometimes for me to believe these places are so close to where I live. We're half a block from the park, and we'll probably move before long, but while we're here, it's wonderful.

Due to additional broken bones in my family, passover was just the two of us. I think we've perfected the meatless seder, and next year maybe we'll have a big group. Here's what I look like with a mouthful of horseradish - the good kind.

In April a very cool project I'm lucky to get to work on sometimes launched a major rewrite. You can do weird mashup stuff with it now like this:

Springtime also means baseball season. The Nats weren't very good but did show signs of life, especially Zimmerman's hitting streak, and the Six Weeks of Healthy Nyjer Morgan. We saw Randy Johnson's 300th win this year, which was fun despite the deluge in which it occurred. The Nats might be actually competitive next year, we'll see. I still haven't had a chance to see the Tigers in DC yet, though, maybe they'll come one of these years.

The Wings had a good run, and even though I saw them lose in person twice (Caps, Preds) it was still a great season for them. They came oh so close:

With the Wings ultimately losing, the highlight of the hockey season for me was seeing the playoff game when Ovechkin and Crosby had matching hat tricks. Probably the most exciting thing I've ever seen at a live sporting event, and that's saying something. I don't have a picture of all the hats on the ice after #8's third that night because I was deliriously screaming at the time. Imagine a lot of drunk people in red hugging and screaming a lot, and hats flying everywhere for ten minutes.

We started ordering local vegetables from a CSA-like service, and it immediately changed how and what we eat, both for the better.

Not that I'm a strict vegetarian, though, or strictly kosher, just mostly both. A highlight of visiting my brother in Austin in June was a trip to Cooper's BBQ:

Another highlight of visiting Austin was visiting my favorite Ben Shahn painting again:

Eastern Market, which burned up shortly after I arrived in DC, reopened after reconstruction, with a big ceremony and big crowds. Strong neighborhood, here.

I even got to say hello to Mayor Fenty that day, and shook his hand just after taking this. Seemed genuinely amicable.

After fourteen years of disuse I started studying Japanese again. I have a long way to go but it's been interesting firing up those language-acquisition and mid-deep-memory sections of the brain again.

We saw Jandek! Seeing the Corwood Rep in person made us want to take things back up to a meta level.

After a few years away I was able to return to my favorite professional conference, Access, in Charlottetown, PEI. It was a great time, though things get kinda rough there sometimes.

At that event I met a very cool librarian who skates on a roller derby team in Toronto. I was in Toronto for another event a few weeks later and got to see her and her teammates and a roller derby bout for the first time. Bill took a picture of us. I love the positive energy, collective/DIY feel, seeing women in a contact sport (which I mean literally... as a boy I did everything, soccer, football, basketball, baseball, street hockey, dodgeball, "indoor nerf soccer with combat", etc., and my sister realized she loved contact sports the first time she tried one in *college*. not fair! girls can/should kick ass, too, and all power to them when they do, whether they're 4, 14, or 44.), and seeing a reinvigorated sport gain popularity. There's a small but growing league here in DC, too, and they skate right down the street from us at the Armory. It's been great fun to watch them, and almost as much fun to learn a few things about sport photography.

I was pretty excited to see their bout today, in fact, but it got canceled due to a blizzard.

...which brings us up to December 19.

Thanks for reliving 2009 with me. There's lots left out, here, namely pictures I should have taken of family and friends who visited us, several more xrays and injuries of various levels of acuteness that made it a fairly painful year, and any of the shots I somehow never took during a fun vacation in Ottawa and Montreal. Oh well, next year.