10 Things I did in 2008

Everyone loves retrospective lists, and I am no different. Cosidering that one of my goals in keeping this blog is to have a way to look back at my life at specific moments in time and see what I was up to, marking what I did this year seems like a good plan. If I had kept this blog all year, this would be a clever way to drive readers to old content, but since I started in October and have no readers, I don’t think that will be happening too much. So yeah, this is by no means an exhaustive list, just 10 things I could thing of over the last few days that seemed at least mildly significant:

1. Graduated from Acadia, and moved to Halifax
2. Worked a 9-5 job I didn’t really enjoy for 6 month
3. Decided I didn’t want to work in a 9-5 job I didn’t like and quit during a recession
4. Figured out, roughly, what I want to do with my life
5. Traveled to another country for a rock concert
6. Finished traveling to all 10 provinces (I finally got to PEI in October)
7. Started a new blog
8. Celebrated my 3rd year anniversary with Jess (now we’ve been going out for 3 years 10 months)
9. Made the switch to Mac, and got an iPhone
10. Went to my first Bar Mitzvah

And that’s that. I’m looking forward to ’09, all indications point to it being a very good year.

Filed under: Uncategorized, list, retrospective, year in review

December 31st – Last day of the year

I can’t believe 2008 is actually over. It seems like it has hardly even begun. I’m going to post a retrospective thing right after this, so I’ll keep this post on topic.

I spent quite a bit of time playing WoW yesterday, but also did some other worthwhile things as well. During the day Jess and I went grocery shopping to restock our fridge after having been away for a week. Since I can drive now, I drove down to pick her up at work during her lunch hour, then we drove over the the Superstore, shopped, had lunch, and then I drove her back to work and came home to unload everything. It worked out quite well.

Then in the evening we made spaghetti for dinner and then I baked cupcakes, and she made some blueberry scones. We are always talking about how we should bake more, so we decided to just go for it. Plus we had both gotten new cookbooks for Christmas so we wanted to try them out.

Tonight should be pretty exciting, we are having some friends over for dinner, then heading down to the Cunard Centre for a fancy schmancy party. Apparently there is a blizzard warning in effect though for tonight so hopefully that doesn’t mess with the plans.

Filed under: Uncategorized, baking, cupcakes, dinner, Everyday, new years eve, scones, wednesday, wow

December 30th – Back in Halifax

Flying over Chicago

My Christmas vacation is over and I am now back in Halifax. I got back on Sunday night at around midnight, after spending about 12 hours travelling and 36 hours without sleeping.

The holiday was fun, there was some family drama, but I figure that always happens. It was great seeing everyone again, I hadn’t seen 2 of my step sisters in about 2.5 years, so they had grown up quite a bit.

We did all the standard Christmas vacation activities; opening presents, shopping, eating a lot, arguing about political views. The day before I left I went with my Dad, brother, and nephew to an MSU hockey game that was held at the Joe Louis Arena in Detroit, which is where the Red Wings play. Pretty cool, even if I don’t like hockey that much. I can’t believe actually that the arena is so small, compared with places like the Air Canada Centre it was tiny. Here’s a picture of us at the game:

At the hockey game

Then on Sunday I flew back to Halifax. Because the airport is in Detroit, but we were staying in East Lansing (an hour away-ish) we had to get up really early so my brother, sister, brother’s fiance, and nephew could make their flight at 9am. When faced with the prospect of going to bed at 1, only to wake up again at 4:30, my brother and I (and his fiance) decided to stay up and watch episodes of Flight of the Concords, and play Super Smash Bros. instead of sleeping. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

My flights were pretty ridiculous. I had to fly from Detroit to Chicago, then from Chicago to Ottawa, Ottawa to Halifax. That is clearly not the most efficient way to travel. I was actually really lucky though considering how many delays there were that while all my flights left later than scheduled, I never missed my next flight because of that delay. I also found myself not enjoying flying as much this time, I think the no sleep and windy conditions combined to make me paranoid as were landing and the plane was shaking all over the place. It’s too bad because I usually love flying.

Then yesterday I unpacked, did some errands, and ended up falling asleep at 9:30pm. Oops.

Filed under: Everyday, christmas, Everyday, family, fllying, halifax, hockey, travel, tuesday, USA

December 22nd – Now licensed to operate a motor vehicle

Yep today was the day. I successfully took and passed my driver’s test and so I now join nearly everyone else on the planet in possessing the ability to drive

The test was at 2 so me and one of Jess’s coworkers (Tracy) went over to the place at around 1:20, and I hung out there for a bit before getting called. The test went well (obviously), I made a few mistakes, mainly because we had a reasonably sized snow storm here last night and so there were huge snow piles everywhere and the roads were a bit icy.

The rest of the day was spent preparing for my trip to Michigan tomorrow. I’m going down to visit my Dad and my brother, sister, step-family, and my sisters son. So it will be a family packed awesome Christmas week. While I grew up in small town Alberta, my Dad now lives in East Lansing, MI and teaches at Michigan State University. This will be the first time I’ve been down there for Christmas (I’ve been down during the summer a few times), so it ill be interesting. This might actually be my first winter visit to the USA but I’m pretty sure that isn’t actually true.

The hardest part of packing was getting all the presents into my bag, but fortunately my tetris like skills at fitting maneuvering objects in small spaces paid off and I got everything in my tiny little suitcase. If it traveled more I would get one of these cool suitcases, but unfortunately I don’t yet have a job that requires business trips. Yet…

So yeah, tomorrow I have to leave the house around 7:30am to catch the shuttle to the airport from the Westin, and then my flight to Toronto leaves at 11:40. So I’ll be at the airport for a bit, and then I also have a bit of a layover in Toronto before flying off to Detroit. It will be fun. I don’t know if I will be posting at all while in the USA, but I’ll probably do some twitter updates and try to put something up here at least once or twice.

Filed under: Everyday

December 21st – Single for the weekend

Well, Jess went home for Christmas yesterday so now I’m living the single life for the next 2 days. You know what that means! No? Neither do I. For some reason as soon as I typed “You know what that means” I immediately thought of…

Hilarious. Anyways.

Friday night I went to Jess’s company Christmas party at Bish. It was fun, but I started to feel really sick around the time the desert came out and so I went home early and lied in bed for a few hours and then went to sleep. Thrilling. And no, it wasn’t from all the booze.

Then yesterday morning Jess and I went to Smitty’s for brunch. We don’t go often, but it isn’t very far away and we didn’t really have any food in the house, so it was a good call. Sweet delicious greasy food. After Smitty’s we went to the grocery store so I could actualy eat for the next 3 days. I think that was also a good call. The she left and I spent the rest of the day playing WoW. Well, I also made dinner, and talked to both of my parents (which is kind of random because I only talk to them like once every two weeks or so), but it was a pretty WoW focused evening. Ran my first heroics (Utgarde Keep and Nexus) which was cool, and I got a couple nice drops out of them.

I don’t have too much to do today, I just need to finish up wrapping presents and mentally prepare myself for my drivers test tomorrow. As long as I get in the car this time, I will consider myself a success.

Oh, and also I finaly bit the bullet and got upgraded to custom CSS editing on this blog, so I will be tweaking it over the next few weeks. Since no one reads this anyway, I will probably make the changes gradually, but we will see. I have the idea for how it should look in my head (and on paper a bit) but I don’t exactly know how to convert that to reality. But I’ll learn.

Filed under: Everyday, bish smittys, brunch, clone high, css, Everyday, makeover, saturday, wow

December 17th – Random road trip to New Brunswick = fun

Yesterday I ended up going to New Brunswick with a bunch of people I had met on Twitter for Third Tuesday New Brunswick. Third Tuesday is a social media meetup that happens every month (guess which day!) to bring people together who work in or are interested in social media. It’s basically a networking event. With beer.

It all started in the morning when @robertsnell posted on twitter saying there was an extra spot in the car heading up there, and I figured I wasn’t doing anything else yesterday so I might as well give it a shot. So at 3pm I headed down to his office downtown and met up with Robert as well as @DarrinSearancke @webconomist @brightwhite and Cory, but I don’t have his twitter so I can’t link to him…

It took us about 3 hours to get to Moncton, including several coffee/smoke breaks along the way, and a near miss of a stop at the Anne Murray Museum. We got to the event a bit early, hung around and chatted with various people before the presentation started. The presentation was by 2 two people who worked at T4G, and it was pretty good. I think I learned quite a bit, but the real value of going was meeting people.

After the presentation we stuck around for awhile and then headed out to come back. We stopped in at Wendy’s though for some dinner, and at the advice of @robertsnell, I tried a baconator. Bad idea. I’ve felt terrible all day today. I guess that is what you get for eating 6 strips of bacon and then driving for 3 hours and then going to bed. All in all though, it was a good day, and it was really cool to meet people I had been twittering with for awhile and actually get to know them a bit.

Filed under: Everyday, Everyday, moncton, networking, new brunswick, social media, third tuesday, twitter, wednesday

December 16th – Finished Xmas shopping

Yesterday ended up being a pretty jam packed day. Maybe not jam packed, but at least jelly packed.

I slept in until around 10 which was really nice. I think that was longest I have slept in for months, even on the weekends I’m generally up at 8 just because I am always up at 8 during the week. Then after waking up I caught up on my reading for the day, RSS feeds and twitter links, plus the news. By the time I had finished that it was already noon and Jess came home for lunch. After lunch I headed out to FedEx a present to my Mom. It ended up being fairly complicated because the location I went to isn’t set up to send things by ground, so I had to use their computers there to go online and fill out the forms, then print it off and affix it to the box. The dude who helped me though was nice and didn’t charge me for the computer time (which is good, cause I wouldn’t have paid it…).

After fedexing, I headed over to the Dal campus to participate in a study I had signed up for while I still worked there. When I arrived though it turns out they had already ran as many participants as they needed so I didn’t need to do it. Bit of a waste of time but that’s alright, I’ve got lots of time these days. Then I went to Second Cup and applied to go to school at Capilano University for September. Pretty exciting. I need to send the department a resume today to complete the application process, but other than that I am good to go. Now I just have to see if I get in, I won’t know until March- April.

And then last night Jess and I went to Chapters to do our last bit of Christmas shopping. We got exactly what we needed and now I am done shopping for this year. I don’t think I’ve ever finished before the 23rd of December so I think I’m doing pretty well this year.

Filed under: Everyday, capilano university, Everyday, fedex, second cup, shopping, tuesday, xmas

December 15th – Level 80 Christmas Shopping in the rain

Let’s see, what did I get up to this weekend? Friday night me and Jess went out for dinner at Elephant and Castle. The food was great, and came out so fast we had hardly realized we had sat down by the time the check came (this is kind of a good thing, and kind of a bad thing). When we walked over (it is about 4-5 blocks away from our apartment) it was raining a little bit, but when we left the restaurant there was a full blown typhoon going on. It was raining really hard and was super windy. We had to stop in at a couple shops along the way just to get out of the rain for a few minutes. I don’t think the employees were too impressed. We had thought about going out later that night, but considering the weather we just hung out at home.

Since we were just hanging out at home I was playing WoW and I finally hit level 80 on my Paladin! Here is a screenshot:

Pretty awesome, I know.

Both Saturday and Sunday I spent some time Christmas shopping. On Saturday we went to Carbonstok and got a gift for my mom. I hadn’t been in there before but it was a pretty cool store (and it’s right around the corner from my apartment). Lots of neat, well designed, and environmentally friendly products. I won’t say what I bought for her, but it is pretty cool. Then on Sunday we went to Uncommon Kids to get something for my nephew, who is 7. Got him one sort of educational toy and one just plain fun toy. I think that is a good combo for someone that age. Still need to maintain my cool uncle rep, but also get him something that will be challenging.

And that was pretty much the weekend. It wasn’t overly eventful but it was good.

Today is now my first day as an unemployed…person. I’ve actually got quite a lot I want to do, so I’m not just going to be lying around the house all day eating cheetos and watching TV. Oh god I hope not.

Filed under: Uncategorized, dinner, Everyday, monday, rain, shopping, typhoon, wow, xmas

December 12th- No longer working for the weekend

Today was my last day of work at Dalhousie. As far as days of work go it went quite well. I spent a lot of time on the morning talking with my boss on the phone, finishing up my last project and making sure we had everything lined up to transition to the new coordinator in January. I think we got everything taken care of.

Then I went for lunch at Subway which was decent though not really all that great. On the plus side I only ate half the sub so now I have lunch for tomorrow.

In the afternoon I finished up organizing all the files, set the “away” messages on the phone and the email account and ended up leaving about a hour early (my boss said I could).

When I got home I decided to take a photo to commemorate this occassion and I would post that here now but my computer crashed as I was working on it so it will be a bit longer for that. I guess Macs can crash. Rarely.

As for the status of my “get a job” plans; I’ve spoken with a bunch of people at Cap College who took the program I am thinking of going into and based on their replies I am planning on applying for September. That gives me 8 months to make some money and plan a move across the country. Can’t wait.

Update: Here is the photo. Apparently I shouldn’t run Photoshop and Bridge at the same time…I need a MacBook Pro:

Filed under: Uncategorized

December 9th – Don’t lick envelopes

Last night I had to help Jess assemble her company’s Xmas cards. We had stacks of labels, envelopes, and cards, and had to put it all together. It was a lot of fun! The kind of fun you hope you never have to experience again. I was in charge of putting the cards in the envelope and sealing them. Fortunately we had one of those water tube stamp wetting thingamajigs because I tried to lick the first one and I’m fairly certain it poisoned me. I started to feel really sick shortly after licking one, and was pretty miserable for the rest of the night. But I still helped her out with it, we just sat on the floor, set the laptop up with some Seinfeild episodes (almost done season 5), and packaged envelopes like it was our job.

In other news from the past couple days, I got my haircut on Saturday at London Hair Design on South Park. It’s really short now. Jess knows the guy who cut our hair (yes, we get our hair cut at the same time by the same person) because he is opening up a new hair salon in Bishop’s Landing soon. I think it is going be called something like Urbanity, but I could be wrong on that. Regardless, his name was Keagan, and I would highly recommend people in Halifax check the place out when it opens, because he did a really good job.

I had this realization about haircutting while I was there, which is that of all the areas of design (and I would say haircutting is about design), cutting hair is one of the few remaining fields where your work has to be right the first time. Photographers are now off the hook with that, web designers never had that, magazine and newspaper designers now always have an undo button, but if you mess up with hair it’s gone. You have to adapt as you go. Kind of interesting, maybe that is why people enjoy it.

And on Sunday I went out with a friend to the mall and bought a few Christmas presents for Jess. Hopefully she will like them. Shopping with 2 guys is easy, we went into the mall, went straight for the stores we wanted to hit and got what we wanted within 20 minutes.

And tonight I am going out for dinner with Jess and 2 of her friends from work. I was going to stay home but we are out of food, so I suppose I can join.

Filed under: Everyday