Another rough year for the economy. The world economy, the national, the state …

People losing jobs. Unemployment of, what, 12.5 percent in California? Something like 10 percent in the nation? Even higher, when you include people who have stopped looking for work and the scads of people not fully employed.

U.S. print journalism is still in free fall — with 15,000 newspaper jobs lost in 2009 — which is awful for lots of people we know in the business. And many of the survivors live in fear that their jobs will disappear next. It’s difficult, no question. And we know what it’s like.

But I can’t complain about 2009. And I won’t. It was kind to me. Very kind.

First, though, let me indulge in a bit of the cliche “old guy marveling at the passage of time” observations.

Seriously, though. Remember when the new millennium was rolling in? Remember “Y2K” and the concern that the world’s computers would seize up the second “2000” rolled around … and planes would fall from the sky and clocks would stop and banks would lose all their data, blah blah blah.

Doesn’t all that seem as if it happened (or didn’t,  actually) … just the other day? Isn’t it fresh in your mind?

And that was 10 years ago.

Forget “where did that year go?” How about, “Where did that decade go?”

We need to give a name to this phenomenon. The older you get, the faster time goes by. It happens to everyone. That’s the law. But what to call it?

Maybe … The Methusaleh Syndrome?

Methuselah, you may recall, lived longer than any man in history, according to the Bible. In Genesis chapter 5, Methusaleh is said to have lived 969 years. (Think of all the candles on that birthday cake.)

And I promise you, when Methusaleh turned, say, 700, he was telling everyone in Canaan, “Wow, did that century fly by! We were worried about making fire when I was 600, and now we’ve just about perfected the wheel … and I had another four generations of descendants,  too.”

To Methusaleh, another decade was like another month, to us. He was the all-timer in “man, wasn’t it just the other day that I turned 500, and now I’m 950?”

OK, enough old guy talk. There are kids in fifth and sixth grade who have zero memory of the 20th century. And they can hold intelligent conversations with us.

But 2009 … I’m actually kind of sad to see it go.

The short version: It started with me in Hong Kong, doing the last of four months as a temporary hire on the copy desk of the International Herald Tribune.

(HK! You wacky, zany, gridlocked, rain-soaked, can-do city! Here’s a shout-out for you! You miss us, don’t you? Go ahead, admit it!)

In February, March and April I was able to do a fair chunk of free-lancing, mostly for the New York Times. I managed to get to a U.S. national soccer qualifying match at El Salvador. That was a kick in the pants. I’d never been to Central America.

Then the Times cut way back on its stringer budget, and Leah was laid off at her nasty (non-journalism) job. I started a soccer blog, Countdown to South Africa, and considered trying to sell it to someone. And even if we had almost no income, I was never bored …

And then came that fateful night in the apartment, maybe early July, when I had a rare moment of inspiration and blurted, “Hey, we can do nothing in Paris as well as we can do nothing in Long Beach!” Meaning that it would cost us only marginally more to both be unemployed in Paris, and wouldn’t that be a more interesting place to spend a month? We decided it was unlikely anyone in SoCal would be hiring the likes of us in August, too. And we agreed it wouldn’t hurt to have a change of scenery. Just hit the “reset” button. Maybe there would be some opportunities … so why not go do the City of Light thing?

(Provided Leah could find some free housing for us from her friends over there. So she got busy asking around, and things fell into place …)

And that led to …

1. Five great weeks in Paris. Doing a lot of nothing aside from socializing, frequenting inexpensive restaurants and rounding up every one of Leah’s former co-workers and Paris friends to drink wine with. Almost all of August and a week of September. Just wonderful. I’ve never had more fun there. Even better when my sister and her husband came over for two weeks.

2. And Paris led to print journalism jobs … for both of us.

Yeah. What are the odds? A thousand to one? A million?

As I have related, we met a woman who was staying in our friend’s apartment, in Paris, in the days before we were to move over there (from a place in the Marais we were leaving). And we went to see her and arrange a key exchange and apartment handover. And the woman we met that day, Nancy Beth, was teaching at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi. After several bottles of rose (it was warm that day) and dinner at the cafe, she mentioned, “Why don’t you see if they have any openings at the newspaper in Abu Dhabi?”

So we did. We asked. At first, we got a polite, “No, thanks.” And not more than a week later we got another message from Abu Dhabi asking, “Would you be interested in taking an editing test?”

Of course we were interested. And it went from there. Tests, and interviews, lots of questions. But before we left Paris, we both had jobs at The National in Abu Dhabi, scheduled to make real salaries at a real newspaper — even if it is a real distance from our homes.

It still seems almost beyond belief. Neither of us was optimistic about getting back into print journalism … or any kind of journalism … and then for both of us to get hired? At the same time and place? A huge break. (And we know there are lots of qualified people back in the States who could be doing what we are doing, if they are willing to go halfway around the world … but we were the ones who won the lottery.)

We spent 4-5 weeks back in SoCal getting ready to move … and on Oct. 15 we left LAX for the Middle East, each of us carrying two bags and two carry-ons (back in those innocent days when two carry-ons were still allowed). We arrived in Abu Dhabi on a steamy Friday night, Oct. 16, were picked up at the airport by a former IHT colleague, dropped off our suitcases and went to an outdoor beer garden. And two days later we started work on the copy desk.

We’re now 2.5 months in,  have found a teeny apartment in the suburbs south of downtown, and we love being back in print journalism. Love it. And getting paid. There’s that, too.

We are just hugely fortunate. Colleagues back home still are getting laid off, but we’ve had no layoffs here yet because Abu Dhabi is floating on oil and natural gas, and as long as our benefactor in the royal family remains convinced a broad-sheet English-language newspaper is something that makes Abu Dhabi and the UAE better … presumably the paper will keep going.

Living in the Emirates has been one ongoing learning experience for us. And, yes, it can be fairly exotic. Living in an Islamic country, getting down the tiny globe and realizing we’re further east than Tehran and closer to India than Egypt. We go see what bits of movies get cut out by censors, talk to cabbies from all over the world, we hear the faithful called to prayer five times a day, and we live in one of the few economic hot spots on the face of the planet …

Oh, and I won our baseball fantasy league, for the first time since 1994. A big deal, for me. (Thanks, Albert Pujols.)

So, no. No complaints here about 2009. We started it with jobs in Hong Kong and we ended it with jobs in Abu Dhabi and we had a great stretch in Paris in between. My loved ones are healthy … and I miss seeing them. But we’ve reached a point in history where we have to think globally  if we want to stay in journalism.

Plus, we have Skype these days, and e-mail, so it’s not like we’re completely sundered from the folks back home. But we miss them, yes, and think of them constantly.

Looking forward to 2010. If it’s half as good as 2009 was, I will be just as grateful, 365 days from now, as I’m feeling right now.