I’m finally getting around to writing a long overdue blog post about what’s been going on in my life lately.  Why my life has been so hectic is that I took a new full time position as a web designer for a local Cambridge company.  I choose not to divulge where here, but if you really need to know IM me or ask me in person. I was hired on a couple weeks ago and started last Tuesday.

So you might think to yourself, well if James took a new job, where does that leave my company SlideawayMedia?  And if you’re that on the ball with your questions, I commend you.  Basically what is happening with Slideaway is it is being moved to the back burner.  I have a few projects still in the air that I am attempting to finish off at the moment.  I intend on continuing doing freelance work, but at a decidedly scaled back level.  I have a a few personal projects that I’d love to spend some more time on as well that will factor into things.  But more then anything I’d like to find some time to enjoy my summer.

For roughly the last year freelancing I’ve learned a lot about myself and the world as a whole.  Taking this new job was definitely a difficult choice for me.  It essentially meant giving up the freedom and flexibility of the freelance world for the more structured life of being back in the corporate world.  Tipping the scales to the other side in many ways was the convenience of a steady paycheque versus hustling to bring in new clients and worrying about whether the job I invoiced for will be paid in time to pay my bills.  After almost a year of it I decided I wanted stability.  All along I had said if the right opportunity came along that I would jump at it.  During that year I sent out 3 resumés to companies that interested me, got 2 interviews and 1 job out of it.

So at this point my life has taken a turn in a new direction.  I’m looking forward to the new challenges that this job will offer.  I’ve worked at my new company for a week and a half and I’m already feeling like I made the right decision.  Lots of good talented people excited about the company and what they do.  Having co-workers again and not having my own office has taken some getting used to, but it definitely brings a positive energy to the work day for sure.

I usually don’t like getting into retrospection too much, but given the end of a decade I’m feeling a little nostalgic. I find myself being born on the turn of a decade, way back in 1980, probably gives my life a certain symmetry that others might not feel when a change of decade comes along. I’ll be turning 30 in February and it definitely feels like life is in the midst of turning to another page.

There is currently a Twitter meme going around called #10yearsago, reflecting on what people were doing a decade ago as the year 2000 approached. To tell you the truth I can barely remember. I had just finished my first semester at Durham College in their design program. I remember my friends and I had a house party at Les’ like we usually did, and as I recall nothing terribly remarkable happened. We used to have big parties with lots of craziness going on all the time, so it seemed almost ironic that kicking off a new millennium we had such a vanilla party.

As a recap to the decade I’m going to do some quick summations of what I actually remember of each year of this decade without doing any deeper research then off the top of my head.

2000
I remember that in 2000 I finally got my driver license. In my teenage years I never really could be bothered and had lots of friends who drove, so it was never a priority of mine. I spent most of my time partying and hanging with friends in the early part of the decade.

2001
I think like most people 9/11 definitely sticks out a one of the defining points of the year, and of the decade but I don’t need to get into that. I also finished my last in school semester of college.

2002
I got hired on at Thompson Printing in Paris to do my co-op semester and was subsequently hired on full time. I graduated from college with my diploma in Graphic Design. I stopped updating my long running website OasisCentral.com, which I had been running since 1997.

2003
I bought my first car, a standard 1999 Hyundai Accent in dark green. So I had to learn to drive stick. This was the year I met my future wife Corina. We met through an online dating site that was called eMode in August and have been together ever since.

2004
I started off this year off with a bang, getting in a car accident and writing off my aforementioned Accent. I t-boned an old lady who jumped a stop sign. I hit her going roughly 70km/h and luckily nobody was hurt. I walked away without a scratch, which led me to buying a silver 2001 Hyundai Accent with the insurance money. I also started this very blog way back in 2K4.

2005
The previous year my parents had given me a move out deadline, my 25th birthday. So as I turned a quarter century old I moved into my first apartment, a 1 bedroom place in Paris. I had lived on my own when I went to college, but living in residence really wasn’t the same as having my own place. This decision to strike out on my own wasn’t necessarily popular with Corina, but I felt the need to assert some independence. It lasted until July when Corina and I decided to move up one floor in my apartment building to a 2 bedroom place. I also tore the anterior cruciate ligament in my left knee while playing soccer. This resulted in surgery and an 18 month recovery before I was back playing soccer.

2006
I can’t recall too much about 2006 aside from the tail end. In December I got hired on as a web designer with Geosign. Also that same month I proposed to Corina in Simcoe, Ontario, 4 days before Christmas. So these 2 events pretty much setup the whirlwind what was my life the next year.

2007
In January I started commuting to my new job in Guelph, which resulted in Corina and I moving to Galt, as I wasn’t too fond of the 50 minutes drive from Paris. This was a big step for me, actually leaving Paris, which I had called home since 1994. We decided to get married on September 29th, so that gave us roughly 10 months to plan and execute our wedding. I worked a whirlwind 5 1/2 months at Geosign before the company went down in flames and I was let go along with half the company. I was unemployed most of the summer, then got hired on to work for Claris Law in Guelph in September. We had an outdoor wedding at Corina’s parents place in Clyde, with the reception held in a tent in the backyard. Weather was sunny and 25 degrees at the end of September. We drove to Massachusetts, then to the Baseball Hall of Fame for our honeymoon. As all this was going on our rental in Galt was being sold which necessitated us moving again, this time back to Clyde and Corina’s old basement apartment.

2008
2008 was another slow year. Basically we hosted the Beer Olympics in Clyde and saved money for a down payment on a house. In December we had our offer accepted on a house in Preston, capping a couple month search for our first home.

2009
In March we moved into our new house. Finally having a house of our own Corina and I decided to adopt our dog Chance, who is also affectionately known as “The Dude”. In June I was let go from my job with Claris. As crappy as that was it gave me the motivation to actually start my own business, SlideawayMedia. It was something I had always wanted to do, but as with most things I usually require a kick in the pants to get started.

While the last year has been tough, I’d say overall I was pretty happy with the 2000′s. I look back at the time and think back to where I figured I’d be at 30. I think the thing that excites me the most is being my own boss and being able to almost pick my own destiny. Who knows, maybe I’m a success, maybe I’ll fall on my face. Either way it is pretty invigorating. I think having a job that you can sleepwalk through everyday really does dull the senses. Working for yourself keeps you on your toes.

Finally got around to posting about our Halloween party we hosted on Friday.  This is the 6th time we’ve hosted the party, but first in the new digs.  Now we had 2 floors and the exterior of the house to decorate, which was a bit of a challenge.  Need to stockup on marked down Halloween decorations now for next year.  We were definitely lacking in outdoor decorations, but we’ll sort that out.

For the costume this year I came up with a couple’s costume idea for Corina and I.  Now it wasn’t quite your conventional couples costume idea, but it worked out quite well.  We went as Jay and Silent Bob, characters from numerous Kevin Smith movies.  I figured it was cool way of spinning the guy/girl costume concept.  The costumes themselves were actually some of the easiest we’ve ever come up with to put together, but got some of the best reactions from people this year.  The only downfall is that we didn’t actually get a picture together wearing the costumes.  I’m going to try remedying that tonight by getting dressed up again and taking a picture.  In the meantime he’s a badly Photoshopped version.

We definitely had a pretty good turnout of people to the party.  We tried to be considerate of those with kids who might need to find babysitters and have the party on the Friday, instead of trying to find someone on Halloween Saturday.  This kind of backfired as there were a few people who would usually be there that didn’t make it because they had to work Friday night.  Oh well, lesson learned on that one.

Our plan this year was to feature just general Halloween music on the main floor, then at the request of Corina, a 1990′s dance party in our basement.  We practically bought this house for parties like this and it worked out quite well.  We managed to pretty much fill the basement at one point in the night which was quite cool.

The best male costume this year was grabbed by Corina as Silent Bob.  She ended up being the runaway winner for that with a vote total dwarfing everyone else.  The girls prize was contested via a 3 way dance off, to which Ally came away as the big winner, with her Amy Winehouse costume. I put together an album of pictures below. You might notice one in there where a bunch of people are humping our neighbours inflatable Halloween decorations. Thanks to Ally, who I yoinked some of her photos from Facebook for this album.

Since we were hosting the party we decided to have our dog Chance spend the night at Corina’s parents place. He’s a bit of a runner when the door is open, so we didn’t want to be chasing him down the street when he escaped. This plan sounded really ideal until Corina picked him up the next day and found he had been sprayed by a skunk the night before. We gave him a bath in tomato juice, baking soda, peroxide and dish soap, which got rid of most of the smell, though I can still smell the faint scent of skunk in his fur. Not quite what I felt like dealing with given the industrial sized hangover I had at the time.

Halloween 2008
Halloween 2007
Halloween 2006
Halloween 2005

This year Corina and I hosted our first Thanksgiving dinner.  With my parents in the process of selling their house I seized upon the opportunity to host my favourite meal of the year.  As an avid fan of cooking I relished the opportunity to host a big, showy holiday dinner.  Since Corina and I moved into our own house we finally had a chance to do just that.

We prepared a turkey, who I dubbed Marcel for the meal.  I don’t know why Marcel, but it just came to me.  I also handled the stuffing, mashed potatoes and made some pumpkin tarts.  Corina handled a wide array of vegetables, including squash, cauliflower, carrots, zucchini and corn.  It turned out to be quite the array of food we had.

Family Thanksgiving dinner

As you can see we managed to fit 8 people around our dinner table rather comfortably.  I was rather surprised how well the table worked.  I think it’s the first time we’ve had a full table.

I used this opportunity to relaunch my blog deelish.ca, which had been neglected since before we moved into our new house.  I posted recipes for the sourdough and rice stuffing, how I went about preparing the turkey and making some great gravy.

Overall I was quite pleased with the whole meal and things seemed to go off without a hitch.  I’ve heard so many “first time” hosting a turkey dinner stories that I was kinda worried some type of calamity might befell my dinner, but everything went awesome.

Tonight I completed what was possibly the most frustrating soccer season I’ve ever played. My team, the Spurs in the Ayr Adult Soccer League, managed to finish the season with a record of 0 wins 14 losses and 2 draws, including the playoffs. It just absolutely eats me up that we were unable to get a single win during this whole season.

Our problems started at the teams very inception. In this league there is a draft and each team captain chooses his own team. The only problem is our captain couldn’t make it, so the team was drafted by another person who had no vested interest in the team, and was drafting another team at the same time. Talk about a conflict of interest. So our team was off to a rocky start.

We started the season off reasonably well, picking up 2 draws in our first 3 games, which gave us hope that we would be at very least competitive over the span of the season. Little did we know this would be the high point of the season. Our team played hard, we were never a pushover to play and we frequently lost close 1 goal games. It wasn’t like anyone on the team folded. We started playing very well down the back stretch of the season, but still couldn’t catch any breaks and simply didn’t have enough scoring power.

Our first round opponent in the playoffs was of course the #1 seeded team that only lost twice during the course of the season. We played our best game of the season in pushing them to a 0 – 0 draw through regulation and overtime, only to come up short in penalty kicks. Tonight was our last chance to avoid the embarrassment of going winless over the entire season as we played in the consolation semi-finals. Again we pushed a much better team to overtime, but ended up coming up short in extra time by a score of 2 – 1.

This whole thing really pisses me off. My whole team was full of good people, we fought hard and played our asses off all season. There were no jerks, there was no attitude, egos or infighting. We just couldn’t buy a break all season. Nobody on this team deserved the infamy of going winless over a whole season. The reality of the situation was that we simply didn’t have enough talent on our team to compete. I was the leading scorer on the team with 6 goals and was one of our better players. While I’m a decent soccer player I know I’m also not someone who you’d pin your hopes on to carry the scoring load over an entire season. I know that I’m a complimentary player, not a natural goal scorer. Before this season I hadn’t scored in 2 previous Ayr league seasons.

In my opinion the league definitely let our team down. They had it fully within their power to trade players from one team to another to restore the competitive balance. There were teams that were absolutely stacked with talent that could have easily withstood losing a decent player. Instead we got a guy off the substitute list who only showed up to half the games as the band-aid solution to the problem . He did help when he was there, but there was probably a reason he was on the sub list in the first place. Everyone in this league signs up to have fun and get some exercise. Obviously there is good natured competitiveness that factors into things, but at the end of the day that is why everyone signs up for this league.

I hope that in future they learn from our experiences and actual set out rules to combat things like that. Every team in the league should have an opportunity to compete and I don’t think we were necessarily given a fair shake.

Through some veiled thinly veiled references on Twitter that some readers might have caught I mentioned that I was out of work. As of last Friday I was let got from where I worked as they wanted to go in another direction with the design. While this whole change of events was obviously unsettling, especially in this current job market, it does have its silver linings. Working on the same site for almost 2 years definitely was a challenge and left me spinning my wheels in a lot of regards. I’d been unhappy at the job for awhile and was at least keeping my ears open with regards to any other opportunities.

The unfortunate part about the timing of when I was let go was that Corina and I had planned to take a weeks vacation this week, our first week off since our honeymoon in 2007. So instead of being a vacation it’s been more work as I’ve been sending out resumes and getting in contact with people. Right after mentioning I was looking for work I had a former co-worker mention he had some freelance work to offer. I then mentioned to my former boss from a previous job that I was looking and she is hooking me up with some work as well, which is awesome.

While ideally I wanted to land a full time position which didn’t have the hassle of exchanging US cheques into Canadian, managing my own taxes and with health benefits, I’m now entertaining the idea of freelancing for awhile and testing the waters. 2 years ago I was at this same point, unemployed after having been let go from my job along with numerous other good people. Though I definitely feel some differences between my situation then and my situation now. 2 years ago I had just moved to Cambridge and really just felt cut adrift and alone in a new city. Now in these subsequent 2 years many of the people I worked with at my previous job have spread out all over the place, starting new companies and new jobs. Since I was the only designer at my job I kinda felt isolated and started going to monthly designer meetups in Waterloo to network and socialize with people in the same field as myself. And I also started using Twitter, which has enabled me to connect with many freelancers who work in the Kitchener/Waterloo/Cambridge area. I definitely feel more connected and better prepared to manage as a freelancer at this point in my life. Who knows, maybe it doesn’t work out and I want to get a regular 9 to 5, but at least I’ll have tried.

So anyone need a designer?:)

As I mentioned a little over a month ago we got a rescue dog named Chance as an addition to our little family. Before we got a dog many people mentioned the concept that getting a dog is like training for becoming a parent. My parents had dogs for nearly my whole life growing up in their house, so having a dog wasn’t necessarily a new thing to me. My parents always had pretty low maintenance dogs and that was something we were looking for when it came time for Corina and I to find a dog of our own. Even though we found a dog that was past the “puppy stages” in life it hasn’t meant the road wouldn’t be bumpy.

mangled blinds

In our first month there have definitely been some highs and lows with our whole relationship. I find the biggest thing I can take out of dog ownership is to begin to understand what my parents went through raising my sister and I as children. How one day a dog can bring so much joy and fun into your life, then the next decide to wantonly destroy stuff in your house. Tonight was one of those low nights. We went out for dinner and did some shopping for Father’s Day only to pull into the driveway to discover the blinds at the front door window maimed beyond recognition. Before we left it had been raining and Chance doesn’t typically like rainy walks so we skipped it tonight. Obviously he was none too pleased that we left him at home alone. When we went upstairs we discovered that he had also destroyed the blinds in my office. Colour me unimpressed.

Chance is really a great dog, but so far we’ve found he does have a bit of a defiant streak in him that we are working on training out of him. In the month we’ve had him he has definitely shown loads of behavioural improvement as he has settled into his new life, which is very encouraging. I just hope we don’t have too many repeats of the blind massacre that happened tonight, because buying new window coverings all the time isn’t cheap.

After a long search Corina and I recently made an addition to our little family unit. Meet Chance, our new dog.  He is a border collie cross that we got from a rescue agency in Guelph.  He’s an old dog, they suspect roughly 5-6 years old, but we were kind of looking for a dog that was past the puppy stages.  We’ve had a few friends go through those stages with their dog in the last year and it definitely made us want a dog that was mature.

So far we’ve had him since Friday and he has been very good.  He just seems to fit right in with things and not be too bothered by his change in situation.  He had been living out on a farm with foster parents in St Clements for the last couple of months, but so far he doesn’t seem to be too bothered by the hustle and bustle of city life.  Originally he had been rescued from a shelter in Ohio, so we now have a yankee dog.

Corina and I had been looking forward to being able to get a dog since we first moved in together back in 2005.  But given we had lived in apartments that didn’t allow for dogs up until the point we moved into our own house getting a dog wasn’t really an option.  Both Corina and I are dog people, having grown up with dogs in our houses most of our lives.

As you can see he is a bit of an odd looking dog.  He generally looks like a border collie, but has short legs.  The rescue initially classified him as possibly crossed with a corgy, but after talking to the fosters and spending some time it definitely seems like he’s mixed with some type of hound.  He’s got that hound bark and tends to lock onto scents like hounds tend to do.  He’s very good natured, loves to get attention and just generally seems to be a happy dog.

We’ve been moved into our new house for 3 weeks now and things have been going quite well so far. Its definitely been a total life adjustment compared to where we previously lived in the country. The only issue I’ve found I’m having a tough time adjusting to is having neighbours up in my grill all the time. We have a middle unit townhouse, which has a mirrored entrance to our neighbours. That inherently isn’t a big issue. I mean that is the very nature of townhouses. The issue I have with our neighbours is that there are 4 adults who live there who all smoke out on the front porch. There just always seems to be someone out there on the stoop sucking on a cancer stick. To me this is just irritating. Personally I don’t like people seeing our comings and goings or what we might purchase going into the house.

Now don’t get me wrong, they aren’t bad people. I don’t have a beef with smokers really. If there is one thing I really dislike in the world, it’s awkward conversation. I just really have no interest in getting to know them on a level more then “hello” or “how’s it going?”. I have no real desire to get to know the guy down the street who keeps his cats on leashes on the front lawn either. Is this just me or does anyone these days really go out of their way to get to know their neighbours? Or am I just being a snob for not wanting to do it?

Hey all, I’ve finally reached the other side of our whole moving adventure. We ended up moving on Friday, but due to technical difficulties we only got the internet setup tonight. Either way I’m happy things seem to be falling into place. I know I’ve heard people say that there is no such thing as a smooth move and I can agree with that after ours.

We had lined up the delivery of a stainless steel fridge and stove for this past Saturday, bought them 2 months in advance and figured we would be good to go. We receive a call on Thursday from Sears telling us the fridge was on backorder and wouldn’t be delivered until the 26th, which was pretty much unacceptable. As luck would have it, the appliances we originally said we didn’t want were left in the house by the previous owners, so we weren’t totally screwed. Either way, I negotiated to get another comparable fridge, but even that couldn’t be delivered until Wednesday. So we’ll finally have a working kitchen as of tomorrow night and be actually able to buy groceries.

We purchased a brand new couch a couple of weeks ago, thinking that it was smaller then the big couch we already had. Our basement staircase is pretty tight, so we knew we might be in for a battle. On move-in day we try to get the larger couch down first, without any luck. Then we tried to finess the new couch down the stairs and discovered it just wouldn’t budge either. I have to say this was about the last thing I wanted to deal with. The next morning my buddy Curtis and I decided another approach, the brute force method. We pushed it into the stairwell and made a nice hole in the ceiling. The way I looked at it was having a couch in the basement was way more important then any damage we could do to the ceiling.

All in all the experience has definitely been fun, if a little stressful. I’m just glad that my life can take on some semblance of sanity after the 3 months of moving related chaos.