The end

OK, I'm a few days late writing this post, but I figured that I needed to wrap up A Frog in BC, since this frog is no longer living in Vancouver. In October, it would have been six years since I first moved here. Almost made it ;)

I'll continue writing, because it's fun and now I have a new set of remote friends to keep informed, but the blog will be different: cue in Relearning Montreal. It's a placeholder for now, until I return from Greece and work on the layout and write a few things.

Bye bye BC, thanks for the good times, hope we see each other again soon. I will miss your mountains and the hiking, the amazing skiing in winter, the seawall, the mild winters and the great friends I have made over the past few years. Take good care of my sister Annie, give her a dry winter like the first one I experienced in 2002-2003.

Realization

I think I have to start blogging more often. I was going over recent posts and they try to cover too many things at once, without really covering anything well. Maybe little daily posts, capturing the thoughts of the moment?

I'm having a hard time focusing these days. Maybe a blog a day would help me order my thoughts and slow down this whirlwind of ideas and activities that are making my head spin. Ideas for work, ideas for school, thoughts about the future, about the present, about what I want, and what I am getting, about what I can give, about why I should care about certain things more, less about others.

I should really get back to Getting Things Done. The book is great for developing a personal system to manage ideas, tasks, etc. OK, let's make it one of the objectives of this week: finish Getting Things Done. I'm realistic and know I won't come up with a system overnight, but having a framework over which to build a system in the future is one step in the right direction.

So how about that regular blogging? One thing at the time I guess...

Happy third!

July 18, 2007 was the mark of three years on A Frog in BC. Three years of writing semi-regularly about life on the West Coast. I'm not sure I ever thought this blog would become a permanent fixture in my life...

Back from... where was I again?

I didn't realize it when I wrote the post, but the little one-liner you've been staring at for a week now was my 500th post! It's pretty crazy when you think about it, but not entirely surprising since the blog started in July 2004. Yes, A Frog in BC will be three-years old in a month!

I'm really enjoying this slow morning, it's raining outside, I'm having a coffee and catching up with e-mails... Hopefully the rain will stop before 5, I have a BBQ with the MBA crowd later today. Lucky me, it rained pretty much all week, but not yesterday, which is my beach volleyball day. I'm starting to get the hang of this game, even learning how to serve overhead. Not that the ball is making it over the net yet, but so close!

School's going well, but having all my group projects and presentations at the very beginning is tiring. Trying to meet with two different groups (one for each class) when people are working and we have evening classes means that weekends are spent in the vault. It's not a figure of speech, our meeting rooms at school are literally located in what used to be a bank vault. You can guess how many windows we have down there... By June 18, all my group work will be over and I can focus on my own assignments and exams.

I got good news from work: I'm getting a raise. I'm sure that the per-pay amount won't be extraordinary, but it's still nice to see that your work is appreciated. We haven't done any formal performance reviews since I started the new position and when you're caught in the day-to-day chaos, it's hard to tell if you're on the right track.

What is your life about?

I ran a little experiment this morning: I went back through one year of posts and added labels to find out what were the topics I would regularly talk about. The result was somewhat revealing. The #1 label for my posts? "friends", with 27 posts. Now that's good, it reflects how important it is for me to spend time with my friends. Now let's look at the other labels I've used frequently:

• "weather" (18): how Canadian ;)
• "sick" (17): remember the coughing, pneumonia? I think I didn't use that label for the seizure, as it doesn't feel like a sickness to me...
• "work" and "running" (16): I did run on a regular basis... last year. I won't even comment on the other label.
• "MBA" (15): that's pretty high, considering that I've been in school only five months out of the past year.

I'm sad to see the following labels getting really low scores:

• "pampering" (1): one facial. Period.
• "personal finances" (1): I did my income taxes. Period.
• "single life" (3): my last date was a long time ago. It wasn't that great.

You ask: why am I going through this exercise right now? Blame Lara. She came out for a walk with me yesterday (so beautiful outside) and we talked about work-life balance, relationships (she did all the talking there) and my failing miserably on a promise I made to myself a few years ago. My professional life is going really well, as I invest a significant amount of my time on my career and education. Which leaves no time for my personal life. And Lara said that I was purposefully keeping myself busy to avoid dealing with my personal life. OK, harsh, but not untrue. I told her I didn't know how to work on my personal life. I told her that working on my professional development was so easy, so straightforward, I naturally gravitated towards rational, structured, impersonal investments in myself.

A few years ago, she told me I had to make time to work on my personal life, stop cramming every day from morning 'till evening.

So yesterday, we talked about this again. Right now, I asked her? How am I going to make time right now? I'm too busy.

That's my point, she replied.

I understand. Except that I have no idea what to do about it, where to stop, where to cut. And honestly, I'm not really excited about the idea of dating. Call me jaded, but I haven't met anyone that really impressed me of lately. I feel that I've been mostly disappointed. But then again, I can't say that my sample can be statistically representative.

This is hard. Wanna talk about the weather?

Why do you blog?

Someone preparing a talk in Vancouver about why people blog wants to know what keeps you writing every week. It's pretty short...

Blogger finally got tired of my ignoring their pleas to upgrade and they have now forced me to move to the new version. What was wrong with the old version? I have had a series of annoying experiences recently with some of my automatic software upgrades and I'm tired of dealing with new versions that are worse than the previous. I updated my version of antivirus, it gave me an incomprehensible error message and then it took me several hours, including one with support, to find out that I had to remove the new version and re-install it. Somehow, the automatic installation didn't work.

Then, after being annoyed by iTunes to upgrade to their latest version (7.0), I finally did it and you know what? It SKIPS! Yes, like old records or a scratched CDs, my electronic music files (i.e. no moving parts) skip of I try to do anything else on the computer while they are playing. No browsing, no scrolling up and down the library... Give me a break! I found some information about the issue on the support site, apparently, I have to uninstall 7.0 and return to the previous version to fix the problem.

Blogger, don't let me down. My fuse is about to blow. Windows Vista? Yah, right.

Hard, soft

I was going to include a picture of myself dressed-up on Halloween (for about two hours) at work. I was a mechanic. However, the picture also prominently displays the logo of the company I am working for. I don't really want to take the chance of getting dooced.

Yesterday, I went for a facial at Skoah in Yaletown. I can get used to such nice pampering. I didn't get sucked into buying all kinds of expensive products... yet. I asked for a few samplers, so I could try the products for a few days. They kindly obliged.

I know... I'm not keeping up with the posts

But I have a very good reason for not posting: I'm preparing my vision. No, I haven't turned new age and haven't landed in self-help hysteria, I'm just finally getting a clear idea of where I am going and what I want.

So, please hang in there while my brain is trying to keep up with the processing and planning. I will happily share my most recent realizations when the time is right.

Pink is the new template

Time for another template change for the blog. This one is more girly, yet very readable. The title of this post is a take on my favorite source of Hollywood gossip on the Web, Pink Is The New Blog. Move over, Entertainment Tonight!

It's also about time that this blog actually show a frog (image borrowed from the Maui County Condo Directory, thank you Google image search).

Post #300

I'm not kidding, that's a pretty good stretch of periodical writing if you ask me. 300 posts to date, some crazy initiative that started in July 2004. I'm quite happy to keep the tradition alive :-)

I went for a long run this morning, the first since the half. I was planning to run around 14km, but changed the route half-way and ran 12km instead. It was pouring outside between 10 and 11:30, when I decided to step out. I don't mind running in the rain, it's the wind that I mind. I use this cool little mapping tool to figure out distances. I also tried using the heartrate monitor again, this time without any set limits. I'll do this for a few months to figure out my target rate, and then try to run within limits.

This afternoon, I saw Charles and Lara. We had tea and sweets, chatted about Charles' trip to Haiti where he will monitor the second round of elections and help with the reconstruction efforts. It's a big deal but a great opportunity for him as well. He's leaving on March 14 and will be gone for six months. This summer, Lara is probably going to visit him. It's just too much time to spend apart otherwise! And he'll probably need a bit of a vacation after all his hard work.

Gerri is also leaving, tonight, but for only one month (only!). She's off to Thailand, to further study Thai massage, spend some time meditating and cleansing, and lots of time on the beach. She does this kind of trip every year, last year, if I remember, she was in India for two months.