Well, it's mostly been a month of no fun. See, after a few months of more travel than staying at home, I ran into that familiar realization that I'm not as fit as I want to be, and that alcohol and not entirely nutritionally sound food are too large a part of my daily intake. Consequently, since I've entered a few months of not traveling, I'm all over the idea that I should address this. And one of the ways I tend to deal with stuff is to start out pretty tough: for all of January, there would be no refined sugar or alcohol. This is where the label "month of no fun" comes in.
Also, though, it's been a sucky month weather-wise. For weeks, it was dreary and overcast, and it rained more than it snowed. While that worked well with my desire to get a whole lot of stuff done in my professional life (and still, it's not enough, it never is, to feel on top of everything), it was also depressing. There are only so many hours you can stand to spend in spinning class or on a treadmill (or running along a gloomy boring road) before you start to feel like a gerbil. Finally, week before last, the gloomy lifted and a high pressure cold system moved in. Saturday last, I decided to walk to the agreement forest that is contiguous with Hilton Falls Conservation Area. It's a few km from my house, but I had time. I didn't know what I'd find, so I strapped my snowshoes on my backpack just in case. And I took the GPS, because I've become a bit obsessed with the stats of what I'm doing (there is not much else to obsess about. It's either that or thinking about trips I'm planning that are really far away).
I hadn't counted on how much more fun I'd have with the GPS along. See, I've gotten lost countless times in this agreement forest. Sometimes, I was in there for hours before getting randomly spit out at an exit, or finding the main east-west trail that I recognize. With the GPS, I boldy wandered off the main trail within about a kilometer of entering the tract. And after a couple of forks, I had one of those "aha!" moments where I finally figured out how one trail that had befuddled me many times fit. I ended up walking 17km that day, and I came home and downloaded the GPS track and decided that I would create my own trail map and never get lost again.
It hasn't entirely been going according to plan. Yesterday, I drove to the entrance closest to my house and fired up the GPS - and realized the fresh batteries I'd put in were completely dead. And rather than spend an extra 10 minutes driving home to get charged ones, I decided to go by gut feel. I had no compass, and the sun wasn't out. And, as usual, I got completely lost, and eventually started following a big trail that I didn't know, figuring I'd end up somewhere near the ski trails in the conservation area. I was completely confused when I got spit out at a parking lot on the Guelph Line (I didn't even know this parking lot existed, but also, I was sure I'd been going east, not west, for the last 45 minutes!) Today, armed with full batteries, I started at that entrance and got spit out at two ones I'd never entered at either, but both of those I already knew about. The first time, I just walked a few hundered meters to the familiar entrance and plunged back in. The second time, I'd already been going for over 8km and the snow was starting to soak through my shoes so I walked back along the roads to my car.
To my surprise, these trails are incredibly well-used by mountain bikers during the winter. I saw about a dozen of them today. This is only good for me, since I happily trudge along in their wake (some of the trails are obvious, others, not so much). As usual, I get pissed off when people walk on the ski tracks, and people always do. It doesn't matter how much trail there is for other uses, if there is a ski track, people will walk on it. I don't get it. For the first hour today, I carefully walked away from the fresh new ski track. By the time I re-walked a section of that trail an hour later, the DIY trackset was replaced by bike tracks and footsteps. Nobody had felt compelled to follow my lonely trail - which was on surface just as good as the ski tracks. (The other thing that pisses me off: the joggers with their - large - off-leash dogs that jump up on me as I'm trudging along minding my own business. I did not need muddy dogpaws on my coat at chest-height. Your dog may be friendly, but I much prefer the stare 
at me and book it coyote I came across today. Also, today I saw that wonderful dog-walker treat: a plastic bag full of dog poo, tied to a branch. It was covered in snow, so has been there for a while. I don't get it - you're in the bush, if your dog craps, so what? Why go to the bother of picking it up and then adding such a nasty trail marker?)
Today, I made waypoints at all unexplored trail junctions. I can't wait for next weekend, so that I can map some more trails. I must walk them *all*, so that I can then forget about this property and not go there again for months. Because that is what I do...
But other than that, no fun this month. Really.
You hear all these stories of how Beijing is bulldozing old neighbourhoods and replacing them with new construction at a breakneck pace to get ready for the Olympics (recently, I also heard that the city issued a properly translated list of something like 35,000 dishes to do away with bafflingly amusing moments such as this one. But I don't think it takes Olympic fever for a massive construction boom.
See, when I was in Guangzhou, after I'd only gotten lost once, I was quite sure that I'd be able to find my way to Rick's office again on my own if I were to come back. I memorized landmarks. All of the landmarks I memorized can be categorized as the built environment. And I should reconsider that. After all, if you look out the office windows, you see the scenes at left (and if you think it looks like people live in this, you'd probably be right - at least, I saw people standing at the edge of that pit brushing their teeth every morning, and that blue line in the picture is a plastic hose that delivers water). 
But if you go for a fairly short walk from the office, you will also come across scenes like the one at right. It only follows that to get from one to the other requires construction.
Consequently, I don't know why I was really all that surprised when one morning I woke up to the delicate sound of jackhammers. Also, the power was cut. We went down to the street to investigate, and we seemed to be in the middle of a construction site. Rick's solution was to pack his Mac and spend the day at a colleague's home. Working without an AC outlet and an internet connection is not feasible for him. 
The best part was that when we came home, the sidewalk in front of the office was gone. I did try to take a picture of them working earlier and they wouldn't let me. My solution was to hang out the window halfway up the office stairs and take the same picture they didn't want me to take from a couple of meters up.
Well, actually, that's not quite the best part. Fun as it was to leap over a ditch every time we came out the door, it gets better. See the pictures below? On the left, you see Wu and Tank enjoying lunch at one of their favourite restaurants a few days before Christmas. The two pictures on the right were taken by Wu a couple of weeks later, and are of the same restaurant. Here today, gone tomorrow.
So, probably if I tried to take the subway and then find Rick's office all on my own another time, I wouldn't find any of my landmarks. Even if I exited the correct subway tunnel...
(The last two pics stolen from Wu's email to Rick, but with permission)
There's a bit of revisionism going on here. I've been changing the dates on past entries to make them more approximate to the weeks or months they actually refer to. While I've never really cared that much about the chronology - my photo albums from pre digital days are actually in non-chronological order too - I feel the need for some housekeeping.
See, the end of 2007 has been marked by a remarkable spurt in productivity. It started with some things I really, really needed to get done at work before the year was out, and the decision to return to the office right after Christmas. The university is closed between Christmas and New Year's. What this means, in reality, is that my building is unbelievably quiet, there's no mail service or computer support, and you can't buy a cup of coffee. What it meant this year was that I managed to be far more productive than I usually am in concentrated periods of time. Fueled by my Remember the Milk list-making (and *that* I added to my gmail during a sleepless night, when it felt like I've got so many balls up in the air that there's going to be splat-splat-splat around me very soon), I crossed tasks off at a pace that can only be achieved when there are zero interruptions. (Also? I missed my colleagues. And coffee.)
Since I was so productive at work, I was inspired to apply some of this at home too. Consequently, I tackled a task I've been procrastinating on for months, if not years: I organized all of my digital photos (well, most). See, I had photos scattered over three hard drives and a handful of backup CDs - and these in turn were split between my office and a drawer at home. Not only that, but the sheer volume of photos on one of the laptops I use was so large that the laptop started chugging along. Now, all these photos have been removed from the various computers and are cohabiting, organized by date, on an external hard drive. Also, I ordered another drive to backup this one, because things do fail. Hey, for now, I'm missing a few directories from 2001 (when I got my first digicam) to early 2004: those photos were stored on the old Toshiba laptop, and it became non-responsive. Matthias asked for it for parts so he could fix Marlene's matching model, and I forked it over with a request for the data off the hard drive if he could get it. I heard nothing further. I suspect that I may find some of the files on one of about three CDs I found labeled "laptop backup" (it only had a 6GB hard drive, which we expanded to 20GB at one point, but I was using nothing higher than a 2MP camera during those years so the photo files would not take massive space).
The chronological (thanks to Picasa) photo organization did for me what this website used to: it created a record of what I did this year. It's a pretty good record, even if I became lazier about taking photos in 2007 than I have been in a long time. And *that* served to remind me why I liked having this blog in the first place - that it's more for me than anyone else (though I'm glad you're reading!). I'm recording my own life. "What I did on my summer vacation" style, except more appropriately titled "things I did that I want to remember". So... I backdated recent entries, and have every intention of filling in some of the blanks, and an even firmer intention of actually updating this blog more frequently (provided I do stuff!) this year.
And now, the photo-triggered (and augmented by Google Calendar) summing up of 2007.
In January, I went to Saskatchewan for work and Thunder Bay to visit Marlene. In February, I went to Alberta for work followed by a glorious weekend of cross-country skiing in Banff. Other than that, I skiied every single weekend (usually both days) in February and early March. In March, I went to Thunder Bay again. In April, I spent time in Chile and Argentina - I had to go to Chile for work, but added a week and a half of fun to that, and even during the work portion not a moment of potential fun having was wasted (I was efficient in April). By May, paddling season had started, and I went on Sam's season opener in Algonquin and portaged my kayak all on my own. My left rotator cuff still regrets that decision. Later that month, I went to Washington D.C. for the first time, for work. In June, I was once again in Saskatchewan (but Saskatoon this time). Also, I paddled a bunch more, including in Massassauga Park, the McCoys and at Cape Croker. I was a bit obsessed with my bicycle in May and June, and rackd up a lot of miles - I quit that when it got too hot, and never got back to it after my vacation in July. In July, I paddled in Massassauga again, and then I drove to Thunder Bay, paddled from Sibley to Rossport, and spent more time in Thunder Bay, camped at Neys, and stopped by Amogla for a few days. In August, I paddled on Georgian Bay out of Bayfield Inlet and Dillon, and spent a couple of days at my boss' cottage on Lake Rousseau. Things started getting crazy in September, when I went to Brazil for work, did a little bit of paddling on Georgian Bay out of Parry Sound and Snug Harbour, and then went to Alberta for work followed by a fun weekend in Jasper. I was home for only a few days before having to (poor me!) go to Norway for a work meeting, followed by a conference in Sweden, followed by a few days goofing off in Germany with HP. When I got back from all of that, I immediately spent a weekend in Thunder Bay, and then I worked what seemed like around the clock (with a break for Eli's visit in November) for a few weeks, because there was a mad scramble of deadlines and things that had to get done. I was ok with this, since I knew that, in December, I'd get to go to the UNFCCC meetings in Indonesia - and, as is my habit, I looked at my itinerary and chose to interrupt it in Hong Kong so that I could explore that city and go to Guangzhou. I came home from that, and got into the car to drive to Sault Ste. Marie in time for Christmas, only to turn around and go home and go to work again.
When I look at it like that, I'm not really all that surprised I didn't bother to take the time to update (it was a big year at work, too, and I still don't like talking about that in any detail on-line). I don't regret not wasting any weekends during the summer or our brief ski season last year in the least.
My biggest accomplishments in 2007 were to finally make it a habit to floss every day and to get my financial house in order. My favourite person this past year was Sebbie, who is a person in his own right but also an extension of my all-time favourite person, my sister Marlene (this was the reason for all the Thunder Bay trips...)
On the surface, my biggest failure this past year was all the flying I did. It's not much of a justification, but the only "personal" flying I did - the entire year - were those trips to Thunder Bay. I did a lot of goofing off in all those other countries, but I managed to combine *all* of that with work-related flights. Like I said, not much of a justification.
I didn't keep up my end in communication with a lot of people this past year. Something had to give somewhere, is the only excuse I have for that. I unconsciously made the choice to spend almost all of my free time with people I already knew. And yet, I met a few pretty great people. I didn't sleep enough, and I wasn't very consistent about diet and exercise - all of that falls apart when I travel.
I've got big plans/hopes for 2008, but, as is always the case in my life, a lot of that is only a potential plan until just before it happens. And with this level of verbosity, I start the year. Perhaps I'll sum up 2008's accomplishments by word count on this blog, in which case, I'm off to a great start.