Year, like stomach, was often full, overstuffed

Well, Moses Lake, we both survived.

Wednesday marks a full year since an impressionable young Washington State University graduate showed up for his first day of real, legitimate work.

Shudder.

Lazy nature aside, I would daresay that the past 366 days have been a rousing success. (Today marks the anniversary of my move to the city.) And in that time, I've learned a lot about my chosen career path, Moses Lake, how to stand up and triumph in the face of adversity (a certain sports editor colleague o' mine has a tendency to throw wadded up paper balls at people he works with) and even a little about business and agriculture.

There has been a lot of changes at the paper since I started. I interviewed for my job with one publisher and showed up to work to be introduced to another. In a year, I have seen three page designers, two editors, two health and education reporters, two county reporters and a partridge in a pear tree.

I've seen Boeing hopes, mad cow disease, emu farms, turkey and gravy-flavored soda, Kwame Jackson at Big Bend Community College and more things potato-related than you could shake a french fry at.

I've survived the city's worst winter in seven years (good timing, Matthew old bean …), and had my car misbehave at least twice.

I've had the joy of old college friends popping in for visits to relieve me of my bouts with homesickness (although the ratio of male visitors to female visitors is quite depressing - come on, ladies!), and partaken in most of the restaurants in and around Moses Lake, to the point where a craving for Don's in Soap Lake seems to occur almost monthly.

And I've also known the joy of making new friends, in learning how to play ping-pong at a local bar on a Friday night (and oh, how the root beer did flow), playing 18 holes of golf for nearly eight straight hours with only two left-handed clubs (nearly killing a man in the process) and just generally pursuing mischief in all of its uproarious glory.

I've cursed the cable gods when my connection froze up just as Luke and Lorelai finally kissed on "Gilmore Girls," reveled in the joys of episodes of "Scrubs" in their entirety, read "Don Quixote" from cover to cover, even retaining a little bit of it.

I've scoured the aisles of shopping centers after midnight in hot pursuit of action figures for my younger brother, and come up with — total score! — count 'em, three Marvel Legends Red Skull figures over the past year. I've cussed myself out for sitting alone on a sunny Friday afternoon in a dark and nearly empty movie theater watching the "Exorcist" prequel, muttering, "You idiot! You know you don't like scary movies!"

It's been a year that was exciting, terrifying, tragic, silly, exhausting and marvelous — often all at the same time.

And in its final days, as I look back at where I was this time last year, and look with one eye forward to whatever tomorrow brings, the other eye rolls back to see the progress I've made, the maturity I've occasionally embraced and the growth that was often foisted upon me. As I revisit the passage of days, one thought, louder and more prevalent than all of the others, forces itself to the forefront of my mind:

Matthew, it's time to go home and go to bed.

Amen, mind, amen. And bring on tomorrow.

Matthew Weaver is the business and agriculture reporter for the Columbia Basin Herald. Although he's been here a whole year, our hero still reserves the right to make mistakes and even learn from them, to act his shoe size and not his age, and to find laughter in the midst of life.