January: The new year started out rather craptastically. I discovered at the tail end of December that my sister, despite her promise to keep working on the houses the two of us inherited from our dad, had done absolutely squat. So as I undertook 18 credit hours and began writing my senior thesis, I also began spending all day Saturday and Sunday working on rehabbing said houses.

February: I began writing papers, the best of which was my meditation on whether or not Canada could declare war on the US. Weekend work on the dilapidated northern properties got so bad that I developed a new coping mechanism, getting drunk when I knew that either my sister or her husband would be at the same house I was working at. It seems that once I was suitably inebriated, I no longer cared enough to want to embed tools into their craniums.

March: I dropped by my sister's house and yelled at her for two hours. I told her that I was starting to fall behind in school and that I couldn't keep coming up every weekend to fix the mess she wasn't willing to help clean up. I tried to adapt Machiavelli to political science rather than philosophy. I also finished my senior thesis.

April: I wrote the two best papers of my academic career. One was a comparison of Locke and Rousseau and their respective states of nature. The other was an examination of Aquinas' understanding of the human soul. On a whim, I put a secret project into the works.

May: My brief academic career came to a close. I'd been rejected by all of the grad schools I'd applied to. I started looking for full time work. Most days I spent working on either Ye Olde House of Doom or the Suburban Horror House. I resumed getting drunk when I knew I was to be working with my sister or her husband. Fortunately for my liver, neither of them came by very frequently. At the end of the month, my Mom came into town like the calvary. A whirlwind of energy, she started making up the work that my sister and her husband had been putting off for the past two years.

June: I started my new job. I reduced my labors at ye northern pits of despair to one day of the weekend. I celebrated my fourteenth anniversary with my wife and my youngest daughter's eight birthday. I spent about $3000 I didn't have on various car repairs. By June, I racked up $20000 in debt on my credit cards by paying both the mortgages my sister and I inherited and a good deal more for living expenses for my wife and I.

July: My sister and I sold the Suburban Horror House. I bicker with my sister on what to do with the money. I want to (1) reimburse myself and (2) pay off both the mortgages. She doesn't. Fuck her, we do it my way. My family went to Pennsylvania for her family reunion. I started getting into early American political philosophy by reading the Federalist papers. I learned to work with both my sister and her husband without needing to get drunk so that I wouldn't murder the fucktards. I started landscaping Ye Olde House of Doome on the weekends. I find out that stage 1 of my secret project was a success.

August: Weekdays, I spend working for the Man. Weekends, I work on Ye Olde House of Doome. Life is dreary.

September: Weekdays, I spend working for the Man. Weekends, I work on Ye Olde House of Doome. Life is dreary. I make plans for stage two of my secret project to take place in February of 2006.

October: Weekdays, I spend working for the Man. Weekends, I work on Ye Olde House of Doome. Life is dreary.  A brief respite comes at the beginning of the month the weekend of my family reunion. Aside from the 4th of July weekend, the first weekend of October is the first weekend I don't work on Ye Olde House of Doome.

November: Weekdays, I spend working for the Man. Weekends, I work on Ye Olde House of Doome. Life is dreary. A brief respite comes at the end of the month during Thanksgiving weekend.

December: Weekdays, I spend working for the Man. Weekends, I work on Ye Olde House of Doome. Life is dreary. A brief respite comes at the end of the month during the Christmas holidays. Due to the annual tradition of the vast majority of friends and relatives either giving me books or gift cards, my library substantially increases.

John Behr:    Saint Irenaeus of Lyons' On the Apostolic Preaching
Isaiah Berlin (ed.):    Russian Thinkers
W.E.B. DuBois:    Darkwater, Voices from Within the Veil
Al Franken:    The Truth (with Jokes)
Alan Jacobs:    The Narnian, The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis
Kaled About El Fadl (ed.):    Islam and the Challenge of Democracy
Ralph Lerner (trans.):    Averroes on Plato's Republic
John O'Kane (trans.):    Asghar Schirazi's The Constitution of Iran, Politics and the State in the Islamic Republic
Leo Strauss:    Thoughts on Machiavelli
Gore Vidal:    Julian

Over all, the year was strenuous, difficult and taxing. A few good things did happen. I earned my bachelors degree and graduated magna cum laude. I landed a decent job. Both of my daughters continue to develop into wondrous creatures of magic. But the year was still hard. I learned how to hate like I've never hated before. The emotional toll from watching me break my back and my bank account put a severe amount of stress on my wife. The odd jobs that need to be addressed in my house continue to grow and remain unfixed as I try to severe the last of the cords that bind my family's fate to that of my sister and her family.

Looking forward, it seems as if 2006 will most likely only contain more of the same of the last half of 2005. The best I can hope for is that it won't be nearly as bad as the first half of 2005.