One of the ways the national media deals with the year ending is to make up lists, the top 10 or 20 or whatever of the past year, the best songs, movies, quotes, news events, etc.

There are far too many categories to cover off in one column, but here's my shot at the year that was. What strikes me about all these lists is that they're inevitably the opinion of someone else, or a group of someone elses, and often have no relevance to me, or to most anyone I know.

I might just be spitballing here (so to speak), but a list of the favourite songs or movies or whatever is highly subjective, therefore kind of useless when you read someone else's list. It's like the list that comes up every of Oscar contenders: most of them have not been seen by anyone outside of the Academy of Motion Pictures. But I can come up with my own list, as I'm sure each one of you can, of what you liked.

To start, these are some movies I've seen and enjoyed in the past year; some of them were up for the Oscars last year, and some did well in theatres, but like most anything creative, it all comes down to one's own tastes.

Shrek the Third was okay (my kids were unsure if they'd like this one, but they did), and I thought the third Pirates of the Caribbean was all right; some thriller or crime type shows I enjoyed included Firewall with Harrison Ford, and The Inside Man with Denzel Washington, and the latest Bond instalment was good too, Casino Royale. It was grittier and more serious than past Bond movies, and of course, the third Jason Bourne movie was good too.

Director Clint Eastwood had a pair of intriguing movies I enjoyed, Letters From Iwo Jima, and Flags of our Fathers, as each showed opposite sides of the war of the same battle, that of Iwo Jima during the Second World War.

A fantasy movie I liked (but my daughter, the fantasy fan, hated) was Pan's Labyrinth.

My top TV shows of this past year included Corner Gas, the CSIs (the original Las Vegas-based one is my favourite), Criminal Minds and Without a Trace. For music, I'm going to say U2's last album (even though strictly speaking it's not new) and the Eagles new one, Long Road out of Eden.

My best present this year was a homemade book of tickets from my writer daughter, enabling me to see sports events on TV; see, with three teenaged kids at home who enjoy possession of the remote, I get to see very few sporting events, so I use the tickets provided, such as when I was following the Roughriders on their road through the playoffs to the Grey Cup.

Now, with all the input, what was my favourite creative exercise? Well, I wrote this story this past year. To preface what it's about, I have to say up front I'm not a fan of country music (I hate it, actually). So, I put a challenge in front of me whereby in my story, my main protagonist is a young woman who is a country singer, and she meets up with a guitarist-songwriter-producer who's into rock and blues - and as improbable as it sounds, how they fell in love and sorted out their, uh, different musical tastes.

I've long held the dream that someday I will get a book published; so then, this coming year, 2008, it is my goal to see if there's a publisher out there who might take a chance on it. If not well, I'll try again.