If you follow me on Twitter you might have noticed that I’ve mentioned a few times about working out and running. Well I have been doing just that. My wife Corina and I have decided to shape up and get fit.

I think I had a few moments of clarity on this whole process. I had gained weight, maybe 8 pounds over my regular weight in the last year. For about the last 8 years I’ve weighed the same. I gained most of my weight in college and never really lost it. I always stayed roughly 235 until this last year. At about this time I was at work and overheard a co-worker talking about how he had lost 40lbs and had altered his diet, started biking and just generally got healthier. It was that day the light went on for me. I decided that tomorrow was the day I would start and began working towards my goal.

My goal is to get to 200lbs. I know I’m going to have to work hard to get there, but I finally feel like something inside me has changed. I feel driven towards my goal. My wife had been trying to lose weight for awhile now and had some success, but now we’d be going on the path together. I had kinda been horrible in that regard, she was trying to make healthier choices, but I wasn’t necessarily interested in doing the same at the time. So now we’re working towards the same goal and it seems to be working so far.

On the 16th of October, I started tracking my calories with MyPlate, an app that I had used before to lose some weight with some success. I’ve found it even easier to use than it had been before. Now I could easily track on my iPhone, iPad and computer. I created a pinned tab in Firefox that is always there so I can track my caloric intake. In the first week and a half I lost 6 lbs.

I started using RunKeeper to track my comings and goings. While I may not have been running, something like a trip to IKEA certainly is worth tracking given how many kilometers you end up walking there. I track bike rides, when I go roller blading and now when I use the treadmill at the gym.

I went out and bought a Kinect for my Xbox along with a few games. Corina had mentioned the idea of wanting to try Zumba, so I picked up a game for that. I also picked up Your Shape: Fitness Evolved 2012. I personally really like this game. While originally I had kinda thought the Kinect was a gimmicky concept to compete with the Wii, I’ve definitely found it is so much more than say WiiFit. It’s basically interactive workout. It can see what you’re doing and suggest how to correct it. It really is the next evolution past workout videos as far as I’m concerned.

I started going to the gym on the weekend. There is a gym at work that I had used maybe twice since I started there, so I figured I’d finally start getting some use from it. I’ve mainly stuck to the treadmill, as I have a goal to do the Jingle Bell Run 5k in Cambridge in 2 weeks. I’m actually amazed how well I’ve been doing. The first week I ran 1.6k, second week 2.7k, third week 4.7k. This week I wanted to do a 5k without including warmup and cool down in the distance. I was able to run 5.1k in 31:38, which I’m pretty proud of. I had to stop for 30 seconds, but aside from that was able to do the whole thing. My soccer conditioning definitely helps. I find I can recover quite quickly and keep going, even after today’s run I still had more to give in my legs.

I also picked up something called a FitBit. It’s basically a fancy pedometer then you clip to your belt. It can track calories burned, how many flights of stairs you’ve tackled and miles walked. I bought one for myself and Corina as an early birthday present and I love it. I have barely taken the thing off since I got it, as it also allows you to track your sleep too. To me this thing was the missing link to calorie tracking. On MyPlate they have settings for sedentary and light activity for calculating calories. I chose sedentary, as I pretty much sit at a computer all day. What I discovered with the FitBit was that I was burning a lot more calories in a day than I thought. I already took the stairs every day, but now that was being tracked. I broke 10000 steps this week after playing soccer. The FitBit gives you badges for progression, so I definitely have goals to shoot for that are attainable within the framework of my everyday life.

Now have I cut out all bad food? No, but I am now accountable for it. I know that if I have a bad day food wise that I have to offset it. If I know I’m going out to somewhere at night, I know to save calories during the day so I can indulge a bit at night. I’ve found one of the biggest things for me has been kicking drinking pop. This is all tied to my change earlier this year to quit caffeine. I had cut down drinking pop already, but now I don’t really have anything luring me back to the dark side.

So far I’m down 11 pounds since I started and have been quite encouraged by the results. There have been good and bad days, but I’ve been keeping positive and moving forward. Corina is doing great as well. I just want to keep moving along on this healthy path as it feels great doing it. I’m challenging myself in ways that maybe I’ve never done before and my body is meeting the challenge and then some. I’m looking forward to being stronger and faster on the soccer field and shocking some people next summer, that’s for sure.

I have a story to share about what happened to me on the way to CinqASept Guelph this evening. Now this is a story that I probably wouldn’t typically share, but the circumstance was a bit too crazy to let it pass without sharing.

I had talked with Corina about going to CinqASept Guelph, which is a local social meetup that takes place on Friday nights 5-7pm at Casey’s in Guelph. So we formulated a plan that involved taking 2 cars as Corina didn’t wish to partake in the post event karaoke that was planned.

So I meet her at her work and I start leading the wrong way, thinking Casey’s was in another part of town. We stopped, conferred on where it was and Corina took the lead driving. She took us through a crazy residential detour but we came out into a part of Guelph I knew well. Coming up to the Hanlon Parkway Corina proceeds to turn the wrong way, as I tried to honk at her to not turn.  So we ended up split up, but at this point we were both able to figure out how to get to Casey’s from there.

I make my way up to Stone Road and go up a few lights and am pretty close to my destination. I’m coming up to the light in front of Stone Road Mall when I had a momentary lapse in judgement and ended up running a red light. All I can really reconstruct was that I believe I was looking over towards Casey’s and since it was just off Stone Road on Edinburgh Rd, so I was wondering if Corina would find it as I told her it was on Stone. I turned my head, looked up and saw a yellow light and I was going too fast to stop in time so I went right through it.  As I sailed through the light I noticed there was a police cruiser sitting in the inside lane on the opposite direction. As I passed I immediately looked in the rear view to see the cruiser pull a U turn around the median and turn on his lights to come after me. I immediately signaled into the right lane and prepared for the inevitable.

The officer comes up and I immediately apologize for my error. He asks the usual, license and insurance, and asks me what happened. I told him straight out that I couldn’t recall just what happened at the very instant before, that I hadn’t been up in that area for awhile and I think I was just looking away from the road for a second when I looked back I saw the yellow light and couldn’t stop in time.

He goes back to his car to presumably write me a big fat ticket while I waited. He comes back to my car and tells me that it would be a $325 ticket and 3 demerit points, hands me back my license and insurance info, then asks me what team I had on my tuque, to which I replied Manchester City. He then said he wasn’t going to give me a ticket and goes back to his car.  At this point I wasn’t 100% sure whether I had heard him right given the road noise, about whether he was or wasn’t going to give me a ticket, so I decided to wait. I didn’t want to chance the fact he said he was writing the ticket and drive off. About a minute passes and he walks back to my car and tells me that he wasn’t giving me a ticket, at which point I thank him graciously.

Now I have no idea whether he was a Man City fan, a soccer fan, hater of Man United or what, but I was absolutely floored. I then went on my to Casey’s, which at this point couldn’t have been much more than 200 metres away from where I was pulled over.

Now I’ve been called a lucky SOB on more than a few occasions in my life, but this one even shocked me.  I showed up at Casey’s, at which point Corina was there waiting and had actually seen me pulled over, so I was definitely in the doghouse.

I feel like an idiot and it really makes me realize how easy distracted driving mistakes can happen.  I’m happy that I didn’t get in an accident or anything serious came out of the event first and foremost.  I don’t believe I’m a bad driver, sure I may speed a bit more often than I should. I’ve only ever gotten a couple tickets for speeding in 10 years of driving and never had any major infractions, so maybe the officer decided to be lenient having looked up my driving record.   All I can say is thank you to this nice Guelph Police officer, it was definitely appreciated, whatever the reason you decided to let me off with a warning for.

It 3 weeks ago I was on Facebook and ran across a post by my friend Lucas Duguid(@octopusred on the Twitters) mentioning that he was on day 1 of quitting caffeine. I myself had been thinking for awhile that I wanted to lay off caffeine, but seeing Lucas had started on his own journey to conquer his addiction, I decided that I would try too. I know I’ve always heard the mantra when it comes to stuff like that, why not today? It seems very easy to want to begin a new week, or month, or year by turning over a new leaf, but that is just really delaying things. So I figured starting Thursday, November 10th I would no long ingest caffeine.

Now I don’t wish to position myself as a hardcore caffeine addict as some folks may be, but I definitely have my vices. Repeatedly in the past I had tried to cut out pop, carbonated beverages or soda as the American folk like to call it. I’ve been a longtime fan of cola beverages in particular. In my house growing up we typically had Diet Pepsi, and I subsequently became a big Pepsi drinker when I got older. My favourite was fountain pop Pepsi, I always loved the extra zip the drink usually had. But over the years it has been said over and over that sugary drinks like Pepsi are quite bad for you, of which I have no doubt.

So the few times I had tried to quit drinking pop I would suddenly gravitate to drinking more coffee. I found that I had grown to really like coffee, after taking years to acquire a taste for it. Over time I also discovered a cycle that would develop. I would start drinking coffee on a regular basis, then after a month would just start feeling terrible. I’d eat food and often have indigestion, regardless of what kind of food it might be. So I would make a concerted effort to ramp down my coffee consumption, and invariably go back to drinking pop.

Maybe I’m just slow, but it didn’t really dawn on me until earlier this year that I was a caffeine addict. The realization just never hit me because I was never one of those people drinking a pot of coffee a morning or downing 5 Cokes a day.  On average I’d say I’d have 1-2 caffeinated beverages a day, with a max of probably 3.  I didn’t frequently have a Pepsi as a pick me up, I usually just had it because I enjoyed it. On mornings I’d be dragging my ass I’d pick up a large McDonalds coffee and feel a little bit more alert for the morning.

What Are The Effects Of Caffeine?

Many people rely on the well known effects of raised alertness, a sense of increased concentration and an ability to alleviate tiredness, but aside from these potential benefits, many negative effects occur as a consequence of consuming caffeine.As a stimulant of the central nervous system, caffeine interferes with responses and interpretations to and from the brain. It increases the production of the stress hormone, hence a feeling of being more alert, can increase acids to the degree of potentially causing a stomach ulcer, alters the anatomical function of the blood vessels and strips the body of vital calcium supply. As a result of these actions people are more susceptible to osteoporosis, irregular heart rhythms and serious illness and pain from the gastro-intestinal tract.

From BeatingAddictions.co.uk

Actually Quitting

I decided to quit pretty much cold turkey. As I mentioned I don’t believe I was heavily addicted drinking 1 or 2 beverages a day, so I didn’t find I suffered from any of the major symptoms, but it did make me realize I did actually suffer with them before.

Symptoms Of Caffeine Withdrawal

Headaches, memory alterations, irritability, tiredness and nausea can all be caused during the period of withdrawal, to be expected when giving-up caffeine. Symptoms of withdrawal may last up to four days.

I have gotten headaches on a semi-regular basis since I was probably 8, but I would never have specifically pinned them on caffeine withdrawl, since I never actually realized I had a problem. Since stopping caffeine, I find I have had less headaches, and if I have had one, the severity is a lot less than before.

I’ve also found that my stress level has dropped dramatically. I simply don’t feel as tightly wound as I did only 3 weeks ago. I find I sleep better and feel more refreshed getting up in the morning.  The only drawback is those mornings where I might have been out late the night before and could use that morning pick me up and can’t do that. I’ve also felt I have more energy in general.

I’ve been firm on my insistence on not ingesting caffeine, but I haven’t given up pop. I’ll drink non caffeinated drinks like root beer, ginger ale, Sprite etc while avoiding cola. I realize if I want this to stick that quitting everything at the same time is just a recipe for failure. I’ve started drinking more hot chocolate, which is obviously sugary and has small amounts of caffeine, at least allows me to replace coffee.  I’ve also had one decaf coffee as well.

The more I’ve read about caffeine the more it really bothers me. I’ve found over the last couple of weeks it just makes me realize how many people are caffeine addicts as well. Places like McDonalds, Tim Hortons and other food chains have a vested interest in keeping you caffeinated. It’s what keeps you coming back. If you’re interested in learning more about caffeine addiction, I suggest checking out OverCaffeinated.org for info.

Yesterday was a pretty shitty day for me.

It wasn’t supposed to be, but as it turns out the die was already cast on Friday for my life to change, I just didn’t know it yet. Corina and I spent the weekend in Halifax and had a pretty good time. we flew out Friday afternoon and flew back Sunday night to Hamilton. I drove down the 403 to Paris, excited to go pickup my dog, The Dude.  I walked up to my parents house and sneakily opened the front door, hoping to surprise him and Wally, my parents dog. I opened the door and nothing happened. I just figured the dogs were outside.

My Mom and Dad walked over and said we’ve got some bad news. At first I thought it was someone in the family, my mind not immediately entertaining the thought it might be my dog. My Mom started to explain that something had happened to The Dude. I immediately thought he must have run away and something happened. He was a notorious runner and this was always my biggest fear with him.  But that wasn’t the case at all.

On Friday he had been playing in the backyard with Wally and my Mom called them back in and Dude didn’t come when she called. She went out to check on him and he was lying on the ground by the fence. My Dad was just getting home on Friday so they both took him to the emergency clinic in Paris. They tried to help him but he had gone into a full shutdown. He apparently had an aneurysm on his heart that burst and all his organs shut down on him.

I was immediately mad at myself for not giving him his heartworm medication on time. He usually gets it the 20th, but with how hectic life had been with Marlene’s funeral and everything it got forgotten until Friday, the day we left for Halifax.  I know it probably had nothing to do with it, but he had heartworm for the 2 1/2 years we owned him and we had him on the medication year round in an effort to kill the heartworm and extend his lifespan.

All I can really say is I’m pretty devastated about this. He was my dog. After Corina and I got him I spent a year working from home doing freelance and pretty much ever since then he was my dog without much doubt. He followed me around the house, and pretty much lived for when I came home after work at the end of the day.  I loved The Dude so much. I just feel so shitty that I couldn’t be there for him at the end. He was there for me, always waiting and super happy when I walked in the door.  He helped me through the hardship of losing my mother in law just by being The Dude and being there.

Our house feels so empty without him here. We bought this house and about a year later got The Dude so much of the memories of this place involve him.  I sit in my office and get out of my chair and look to see where he would be lying behind me so I don’t trip on him. When it was dark in the office I would shuffle my feet across the carpet so as not to step on him when I couldn’t see him. I did that last night.  I woke up this morning and looked for him before I stepped out of bed. Usually he’d be up in my grill at the side of the bed looking for me to give him a pet first thing in the morning, or over harassing Corina to get up and let him out.

He was an old dog. We had no idea how old, but I always liked to think optimistically that he was on the younger end of things. He was a rescued dog from a kill shelter in Ohio, but we didn’t know much more than that. Either way we believe he had a tough road to end up with us. I knew he was old, but never wanted to believe that we wouldn’t have a few more years with him. He was always a vibrant brute of a dog. He fashioned his own doggy door through our screen door with his head, he was always just strength and power even though he was old.

I think most people who ever met him fell in love with him. He was a dog who often had a happy grin on his face and was always so happy to meet you, be it on the street or at our front door. You were a new friend and possible new source of pets and cuddles.  He loved surfing out the back window of the car. I used to love seeing the reactions of kids and adults alike as they saw his friendly face hanging out the window with his trademark bandana on.

But now we soldier on without The Dude, the dog of many names. When we adopted him his name was Chance, as dubbed by the people who had him in foster care. When he was initially rescued they had called him Kirby. We got him and he subsequently became The Dude, after Jeff Bridge’s character from the Big Lebowski. I have no idea why I named him that, it just kinda came to me. He had many other nicknames I tagged him with, with my favourite being Mr Harrooo, after the sound he made when he howled.

Rest In Peace Dude, I’m sorry I couldn’t be there for you in your time of need.

I may be crazy, but I’ve long believed in the power of lucky bamboo.  I’ve had a bamboo plant for 8 years now, typically in my office. Now according to Chinese tradition, the number of stalks has meaning.  Typically the rule is you want to avoid having odd numbers of bamboo shoots, as it is bad luck except for the number 8.  Here is a list of meanings I grabbed from About.com.

• Two stalks represent love.
• Three stalks represent Fu (happiness), Lu (wealth), and Soh (long life).
• Five stalks represent the areas of life that represent wealth (e.g., spiritual, mental, emotional, physical, and intuitive).
• Six stalks represent good luck and wealth.
• Seven stalks represent good health.
• Eight stalks represent growth.
• Nine stalks represent great luck.
• Ten stalks represent perfection.
• Twenty-one stalks represent a powerful blessing.

Now I bring this all up because I’ve long found my fortunes are often tied to this plant.  In the past when one stalk would be dying I would typically have a string of bad luck, at which point I would remove the dying stalk and replace it with another one and I would find my fortunes would change. You can typically buy them at a grocery store, so they aren’t that hard to come by.  I have found myself heading out to buy a replacement bamboo shoot in an effort to change my luck.  I would say this cycle has played out in my life at least 5 times now.  I’ve left work in the middle of a day to buy a bamboo shoot to try and right my luck.

It’s pretty easy to get busy and forget about a plant sitting in my office, but seriously this is freaky.  Up until tonight I was unaware of the negative connotations tied with having 4 stalks until I researched it.

4 Stalks are always avoided because the Chinese Four sounds similar to the Chinese word for Death.

I had a pot of 5 bamboo stalks and one had recently started dying.  So I was down to 4 stalks. As I’m sure many people are aware, my mother in law recently passed away from Cancer, so my wife Corina and I have been dealing with difficult things for awhile now and I can’t say rushing out to buy a bamboo shoot was a top priority. I then discovered today that while I was away for the weekend my dog, The Dude, passed away of a heart aneurysm while at my parents house(I’ll address that in a future blog, I just needed to spit this one out first).  Both of these passings occurred while I only had 4 healthy bamboo stalks!  That is just straight up fucked up.

As soon as it dawned on me after we got home I rushed over to Zehrs and purchased 3 more bamboo stalks and planted them.  I may be totally crazy, but that shit just totally happened to me.

I’ve been fortunate in my life not to have dealt with loss.  I’m 31 years old and I’d say I’ve been lucky to have avoided the heartache of losing someone really close to me.  Sure people have died, but nobody that impacted my life on a regular basis.  I’ve lost all my grandparents, but for one reason or another the impact of the loss was diminished in some way. First my Mom’s mother died and I was too young to really understand the impact of the loss. Years later my Dad’s father died and it was sudden. We had long lived a great distance apart so that diminished the effect it had on me, as while I loved my Grandpa, I just wasn’t old enough to appreciate him and how similar he and I were because we used to only see each other once or twice a year.  Next my Mom’s Father passed and we were estranged from him at the time. He had started living with another woman after my Grandma passed and she didn’t really want anything to do with his family. So when he passed we had essentially seen him once over the span of 10 years, which also coincided with our family move to Paris. When my Dad’s mother passed away it was sudden, but she was 80 so she had lived a pretty full life to that point. We saw her on a semi regular basis and were there when she passed, so I’d say this was the closest loss I’ve had to this point in my life.

That changed yesterday. My wife Corina’s mother Marlene passed away. She had been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer 4 months ago and unfortunately lost her battle yesterday on a sunny Fall morning. She had been sick for probably 2 years, her troubles seemingly starting with a gallbladder issue and progressing from there.  This was actually a second round with Cancer, as she actually had beat ovarian Cancer back in the 70s after having her 4th child, my wife Corina. I think we were all amazed with the speed with which things happened. It was like Cancer came back and decided it wasn’t messing about this time. It started with the lungs, then spots on her spine, then into the bones. They tried chemotherapy but it only seemed to make things spread faster. They tried radiation, but by that time things were too far gone. The original prognosis for terminal lung cancer was 2 years, but with how fast things progressed 4 months was all we got. I think everyone thought we’d get another Christmas with Marlene, but instead we didn’t even make it to Thanksgiving.

I will readily admit that I haven’t been the greatest husband through all of this. I found that I was pretty poorly equipped to deal with a “long term” illness in the family. I just didn’t know how to cope with things. To this point the loss that was my closest experience was the passing of my childhood dog Pudge, so I didn’t have much to draw on when relating to what was going on.  The thing I remember about Pudge was the idea that my parents said she’d have to be put down in a couple months, as she was 15 years old and having problems with a variety of things. The part I related was how when someone says a couple months you cling to that. You figure those couple months will never elapse, so when the day comes finally you’re crushed because you always thought you’d have a few more months.  I found that since I hadn’t had much personal experience dealing with a prolonged illness I wasn’t prepared for the marathon of ups and downs that we got to experience over the last few months.

I found that Corina and I dealt with this whole process differently. As much as I typically live and share my life publicly through Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare, I am a pretty private person. I think like anyone I cherry pick what I share with the world and what I don’t. Talking about the health of my Mother-In-Law wasn’t something I shared with a lot of people. I probably told maybe 4 or 5 people during the whole time this was happening.  I’d readily talk about it if a person already knew, but I rarely brought it up on my own.  I would typically want to spend time with people who didn’t know, so I could leave those worries at home when I went out. Corina was the total opposite, essentially closing herself off publicly and surrounding herself with people who did know what was going on and could offer support.

Going through something like this I’ve discovered how many great people around Corina and I genuinely do care about us. Be it longtime friends, family or people we’ve only known for a short time the outpouring of support has been amazing. I just can’t thank everyone enough for your kindness.  We still have some difficult road ahead of us, but it is really nice knowing we have people around us who do care.

It’s been awhile since I blogged, but for that I make no apologies. Life gets busy and inherently stuff like blogging tends to go by the wayside as a biproduct. But during this time I can’t help but feel like something was missing. Inherently blogging is something that is a part of me, something that I’ve done for over 6 years now, so I obviously have lots of time and effort invested in it.

Now really the point of this blog was something that my wife said to me yesterday that kinda cut deep. She said that she had talked with people previously and that they had mentioned how they didn’t really actually know me, or what made me tick. For some reason this bit of information left me unsettled, as it’s not something I’ve ever really considered. Per say I’ve long viewed myself as an open book. I’ve had a blog since 2004 and have used Twitter since 2008, so I felt that I quite often shared good portions of my life with those willing to listen. I know online it’s very easy to editorialize your life and gloss over parts you don’t want to expose while highlighting the good parts. And really I’m only exposing my life to those who wish to follow me through social media and not too much farther.

It just got me thinking that maybe I have editorialized my life a bit too much, to the point that nobody actually knows who I am. I’m a person that is generally well liked, I make friends easily and don’t tend to cause much drama or wish to rock the boat too much. I seem to be at a point in my life where I have million friends, but very few actually close friends. Most people who I would have considered close confidants from my early-20s are gone, either moved away, or having drifted in different directions in life. This change is also a biproduct of getting into a relationship and inherently happens to everyone.

The realization I’ve had is that it really is true. Very few people actually know me and actually understand what makes me tick. I think the reality of the situation is that I’ve rarely in the last 5-10 years put out the effort required to forge lasting friendships with people. Making friends was so easy that I’d typically just make more friends instead of putting the effort at maintaining friendships, which only compounds the problem. Having lots of friends is great, but it tends to spread you too thin. Instead of spending quality time with people I find I’ll get together in group situations where you get to see lots of friends. And every time I hang out with friends I haven’t seen in awhile there is always that pang of guilt at the fact I don’t get to see them more often and spend actual quality time.

Ideally I think everyone in this world wishes they had more free time, more flexibility and the ability to hang out with friends more often. The problem is that as people move forward in life their lives get more insular. I recall this phenomena from when I was a teenager. We used to always pile into a buddy’s parents car to go places. There were always rules and restrictions on the car, be it a curfew or where you could drive to. I recall saying, and I paraphrase “When I get a car we’ll go everywhere, do everything. It’ll be awesome!”. But what happens is you and your friends start getting their own cars and everyone wants to drive themselves. It becomes the opposite of the teenage dream, you now have the freedom to go anywhere, but now you own a car and worry about the wear and tear of having all your friends in the car. And now you have a car payment, insurance and gas to worry about, so you don’t have the freedom you once thought you’d have. The exact same pattern happens as you move out of your parents house into a rental, or buy your own house. The freedom you envisioned to have parties all the time is tempered by all the costs of being self sufficient and living independently.

This all just makes me wonder, have I been doing it wrong? Have I been making friends, but not actually making friends? Am I just someone that people like to have around, but not someone who is of any consequence to their lives? Questions I myself don’t have answers for.

I hate writing woe is me kind of blog posts, but I just felt the need for some brutal honesty. Honesty I’m not sure I’ve often let myself show online.

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