Mike Dougherty's Blog

Shaking the rust off and closing out 2009

Can you get rusty at writing a blog?

Has the process existed long enough for rust to form? Still, it has been more than a week, so I should deposit butt in chair and write, as an old English teacher used to tell me.

Between the unseasonably cold weather, the sickening slaying of Salvation Army Maj. Philip Wise on Christmas Eve and the apparent sudden death of former state Rep. Sharon Dobbins on Wednesday, it has been tough getting into the spirit of 2010.

(By the way, I think I’ll go with the pronunciation as “twenty-ten,” rather than “two-thousand-ten,” because it’s shorter and … let’s face it, we’re all going to be saying either “twenty-whatever” or “two thousand-whatever” for the rest of our lives.)

A few items to close out 2009:

• My favorite Christmas-related moment in the spiritual sense was the beautiful job of singing by the children (consisting of three youngsters) of First Presbyterian Church of North Little Rock at the Christmas Eve candlelight service Dec. 24.
• Favorite Christmas album discovered this year was the one by Chris Isaak (released in 2004). It has a lot of steel guitar and clever rephrasing of some traditional lyrics that gave it a Hawaiian feel and made offering seem light and enjoyable.
• Funniest moment (in retrospect) was my two brothers and I sitting at Mom’s dining room table playing dueling smartphones, all of a different make and model, as two of us compared a new iPhone and Droid received as Christmas gifts while the other brother showed why he was sticking with his Blackberry.