Many will remember 2009 as a year of prominent deaths — like the passing of Patrick McGoohan, Ricardo Montalban, John Updike, Bea Arthur, Dom DeLuise, Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, Walter Cronkite, Ted Kennedy, Brittany Murphy, Billy Mays, and more — but closest to home for me were the deaths of two uncles on my dad’s side: Cesar and Tito; as well as the death of President Cory Aquino.

International travel-wise, we started the year in the Philippines, and passed by Tokyo for a few days on our way back to DC. In May we did a week in London. Locally, there were our regular trips to New Jersey and New York. At one point on a trip to see Amy’s grandma in New Jersey, we found an old signature book called “Ghosts of My Friends.”

On a cold day in January, we watched the inauguration of President Obama.

For April Fool’s Day, I changed the front page of the site to a Twitter Search, parodying a social media gimmick from Skittles.

Summer was eventful. Amy got a wall at Artomatic to show some of her paintings and drawings. Her parents even came down to visit and see her work. The depictions of mushrooms were popular with biologists and mycology hobbyists. I got kind of close to a blue heron along the C&O. Around the Fourth of July we learned about Wales at the Folklife Festival, saw even more blue herons on Theodore Roosevelt Island, and watched fireworks from near the White House. When Ted Kennedy died, we were on hand to see his funeral procession at the Capitol.

In September we bought a new condo and moved out of DC to NoVA.

Thanksgiving and Christmas were spent with Amy’s folks in New Jersey.

We got a historic snowstorm a week before Christmas, but stayed (mostly) ensconced in our snug condo, venturing only briefly out into the cold.

Internet-wise, through 2009 I got a bit scattered across social media and virtual worlds: mostly Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, and Second Life. I’m sorry to say that this increased involvement in other realms of content has come at the expense of attention paid to my own site, so How Now Brownpau and other related projects have stagnated over the course of the year — something I hope to change in coming weeks. Backtagging thousands of old entries is hard.