Now that my latest baking project is out of the oven and on the rack, I figure I might as well fire off a few words about life as I know it right now. It's hard to really put this year together in words while I'm just sitting here mulling it over. As with any passage of time a lot has happened, some good, some bad, etc. The act of writing here is reminding me that I really miss my baking blog and I think I'm going to make an effort to update that in the next month or so; get caught up on all the things I've made in the last little bit.

Health-wise, things are doing really well. I've got a fantastic app for my phone to track my calories burned and calories available for food; so far it's working reasonably well, definitely better than anything I achieved while I was still using Weight Watchers. I'm about to finish my second month of kettlebell training and will probably do another one because I'm loving the results. My arms are certainly the best they've ever been and I'm slowly getting rid of my much-hated love handles.

I'm going to be interspersing this exercise regimen with lots of running because I signed up to do a marathon in Toronto in October. I had really been tossing the idea around for a while, then found a book called the Non-Runner's Marathon Trainer that has a near-100% success rate in getting the students who used it when it was a class to run a marathon. I do not care where I place in the damn thing, I'm not looking to win at my age, but to say I finished one would be a major life accomplishment for me. It also gives us a good excuse to take a vacation to Toronto this year, which is certainly cheaper than most options.

Things at work are fine, usual trials and tribulations. We're growing which is good. I can't say much else, I have a really good job and the pay always smoothes over the indignities that I may have to suffer.

I am completely MMO free, have been for over a month now, don't miss it. I was struggling to give a shit about Star Wars and I certainly could not give a damn about anything Warcraft related any more. It has left me a lot more time to exercise, watch TV with Cassie, and play my much more satisfying single-player fare. Right now my Wii has been dusted off and is playing Xenoblade Chronicles, while The Witcher 2 hangs out in the 360. I'm still not sure if the PS3 has a function beyond playing blu-rays.

Been doing Project 365 on my Facebook, that's been a lot of fun, though I end up with pictures of the weirdest stuff sometimes, thanks to necessity.

Life's doing okay. There's still an assload of debt dangling over my head, but we're working on it. I'm a champion budgeter and it is going to take a couple years to extricate myself from the poor decisions of the past, but it's happening, which is nice.

Have my health, which is better than ever, have plans for the future, have goals to accomplish and tons of recipes. Not much more you can ask for.

Not as exciting as Year in Review, 2000BC, where we learned how to make butter churns, but I wasn't around then, now was I?

( Looking back on a year in the life... )

Not a big fan of LJ these days. Beyond my blah-blah-blah-mention-it-every-time writer's block, I don't like the stupid ads and the generally crap service ever since the Bolshevek Mafia got their hands on it. Really frustrating, and with reams of my friend list not bothering to post any more it is a lonely, lonely place. Though I am grateful for the few active friends still plugging away at it.

There's Facebook, but my passionate hatred of Facebook is turning into a vitriol so pure and undiluted in its essence that I feel I should go pick up a pulpit and some stones to cast. My friends list is chock-a-block with people who considered me a friend and I was never miserable enough to disabuse them of the notion and people from my high school days who have some strange trick of perception where they forget the parts in which they made me largely miserable for the years I spent in it. Google+ may currently have a debatably hipster-ish quality to it that is a touch off-putting, but being something more niche that scads of idiots are not currently infesting has its upside.

The converse is that I truly appreciate my actual friends because frankly they put up with me and I feel I'm very lousy at being a human being some days. Relating to other people is sometimes an incredible act of human will on my part (I'd try dog will but the leg humping would throw my back out) and I always feel like I'm not very good at disguising that.

Speaking of my back, I have discovered that sloth-like levels of apathy are truly bad for it, so I am pretty much forced into regular exercise patterns. This works for me, frankly. Cassie and I have taken up running, and to our mutual surprise I am utterly loving it. It's really at the level where I wish I had discovered it earlier in my life. We're slowly working our way along a set of routines and have signed up for our first 5k in the fall, possibly doing one before it if we remember to sign up. Combined with my resumption of P90X I am feeling much better about my exercise levels than I have in a bit.

My other new thingi is baking. There's not much to say there. I got this really weird idea to make a carrot cake and see how it went. It went very, very, very well. Crazy well. Shockingly so. I cannot overemphasize the ridiculous nature of me baking, but the results speak mightily for themselves. For the past month I have been picking up baking odds and ends and experimenting with a new recipe most every weekend. Nothing terribly complicated, but I love it and the results are very delicious. Yet another reason I'm very glad I have started running again.

Still, it's been enough of a thing that I've started a blog because that is what people do. It's http://twothousandnom.blogspot.com and I'm hoiping once I upload the pics off the camera to use it as a quick and dirty chronicle of the baking I've been doing and possibly some shots of the process and the results. It may not exactly be writing or anything, but creativity is creativity.

Good morning world!

I'm currently in Indiana, tapping away on a dubiously designed Mac keyboard (you shortened a shift key to make space for a tilde key, really?) while I enjoy a delicious tumbler of Pepsi Max post-morning run.

Since I haven't exactly been prolific in my writing of late there's been far too much to properly sum up in a few paragraphs (also this keyboard and i are going to have it out in a bit).  Suffice to say, Cassie and I are currently on our first real vacation in a couple years, having driven down to South Bend, Indiana to visit with Cassie's best friend and her goddaughter.

Okay, that means a travelogue is forthcoming, right?  Oh yes!  Cassie and I had both been to the States once apiece, separate times, and certainly not driving.  We plotted a route from Ottawa and it came in at a reasonable twelve hours so we said we could handle it, packed ourselves up, set up care for Sherlock and Grace, and then hit the road at a reasonable 8am on Saturday morning.

We first stopped at our favorite local bakery, Art-Is-In Bakery, to get some of their amazing bread for our hosts, Dee and Jean.  Art-Is-In is one of our regular stops on the weekends when we're feeling lazy and want some good bread.  Their jalapeno and cheddar is mind-blowing and makes wading through rows of trendy hipsters well worth it.  After we gassed up and got some bread it was onto the 401.  Pretty mild drive until we made it to Toronto when we encountered our first obstacle in the form of traffic.  Bit of a close shave in gassing the car up as we skirted most of Toronto with a near-empty tank, then it pretty much was a blur of London and etc etc until we made it to Sarnia.

Sarnia reminds me of a cheap low-rent knock-off of Narnia, in name only.  I amused myself by thinking of ways I could get myself in trouble at the border crossing. "What do you do for a living, sir?" "Drugs!" "Purpose of your visit?" "Smuggling!".  A few death glares from Cassie and the extreme 'if you so much as smile you are getting the rubber glove and if you're really bad we're putting the glove around the sniffer dog's teeth' attitude from the border guard made me very polite and then we got to the crappiest part of the trip.

The bloody bridge across to the States is insane!  IN. SANE.  I do not mind building heights, but something about driving over high bridges has always ground my gears.  This was something else.  I white-knuckled the wheel the whole way over and then we were in Michigan.

Oh god, Michigan.  At first it was pretty amusing, signs for 'www.poopycredit.com' and 'www.bringthemhome.com' which appeared to be a covert ops group that breaks your elderly loved ones out of federal old person holding grounds.  Then we saw a sign saying 'Prison Area Do Not Pick Up Hitchhikers' and the laughter started to get slightly more nervous.  Then we got to Detroit.  People in Detroit drive like lunatics and it lived up to every horror story I could possibly envision short of being shot at as we drove.

My life lesson from Michigan is that American roads have extremely poorly delineated merging lanes.  Seriously, they are wretched compared to Canada's and the signage is nonexistent.

Still, we made it after a wrong turn through Kalamazoo and a stopover at the Cracker Barrel.  Cracker Barrel was fun, though I was disappointed to learn that Moon Pies are freakin' Wagon Wheels.  The much-vaunted American portion size was in full effect though, and I am pretty sure I managed to half the caloric and fat content by not abusing the huge vat of gravy that came with the meals.  Disturbing white thick gravy that tasted like a salt slurry.  I was totally okay with not having too much.

Finally after 13 hours all told we rolled into South Bend.  Cassie and I were tired but happy, she helped make the time fly by, I drove the whole thing and wasn't tired once.  Longest I've ever driven, and now the furthest into the States I've ever been.  We have three days of chilling planned and some light shopping plus geocaching and touring to do.  We just got back, as noted, from our run and now it's time for a shower!

Hey, actual content. Glad I'm not paid by the post.

Well, I decided to tackle at least one thing new this year so I could feel less stuck in a rut. After that old lady picked herself up off the ground, I decided to try a second thing too since the first felt so good. Well, it has long been a dream of mine to try out for Jeopardy! and I figured I might as well pie in the sky and look up the process. I keep forgetting that when I used to dream this dream I was in a pre-internet era (I swear it existed once) and the likelihood of a contestant search coming to any place in Newfoundland, let alone one with 3500 people, was pretty slim (maybe if Alex had a plane flying to Europe that the Soviets shot down overhead and he parachuted in, but even then, pretty slim).

These days? Sign up and do it online. So I signed up and did it online. Interesting experience! I could tell this was Canadian friendly from the get-go, where I was able to enter our Postal Code without issue but then had to indicate that I was from New York to blunt force my way through the application. That hurdle discretely managed I was just waiting for my chance to get chumped by actual Jeopardy! questions with the option to do it in my pajamas with as much booze as I might want. Just like the show!

So the actual test was set for Tuesday prior and it was a pretty quick affair. You have 50 questions, 15 seconds per, with no chance to pause or otherwise sneak off to Google. It was pretty humbling. I used to keep a really handy pool of general knowledge on me back in the day, but it hasn't gotten much use in recent years and it showed. Some questions were easy but others were just, oof, so bad. I don't know much about recent books, classical music, and my geography is pretty tepid apparently. Oh and art history. And American history. What really made me cringe was when I passed on a question and then realized the answer about three questions later. This was particularly demoralizing during the 'rhyme time' category which is one that I usually stomp when I'm watching the show as it is just simple wordplay. The answer was 'Bunyan's shoulderwear' or some such and I got woefully hung up trying to work around a variant of 'Paul's epaulets' when to my dismay I twigged it afterwards as the obvious 'Paul's shawls'. Grr.

Still, it was a lot of fun just to try. I had no real expectations and now I know generally where my suckiest topics are. Am I going to do this again? Oh yes. I have a guide to classical music coming to me from the library and will be infusing my body with general trivia for a year just for the hell of it. I mean, why not, I'm not doing that much with my time outside of reading and gaming and trying to get back to working out, none of which should preclude me from attempting this in future.

I think the more ridiculous the goal, the more I can get behind it, so we'll file this under a great idea for me. Maybe I'll start creative writing again next.

Got a bit older today.

For proof of this statement, please refer to H.P. Lovecraft's seminal "At the Mountains of Madness An Hour Earlier Than is Strictly Necessary".

Given that I blinked and a month and a half had passed since I last wrote in my journal, it is safe to say at this point that my interest in doing thirty days of random topics eventually withered on the vine and got dipped in chocolate and sold to some obnoxious movie-goer. These things happen. While I am briefly, somewhat furtively, trying to re-ignite the sparks of my long-forgotten creative juices it does not help to be offering a series of random pontifications on the food going in my belly. I don't think even Charlton Heston on his best day could have wrested any gravitas from that, although Al Pacino could have punched it up with a few hoo-ha's I guess.

Here's something of a novel course for a journal entry - life's good! Man, I should go back and read the emo-bomb that comprises my old entries some time just for laughs and sadness. But, no, life has been all over the place for the last year and now, finally, it's coming back into the mostly good region of space-time.

Let's start with work - I am a dynamo of a pharmacist. The secret? Doing my job! No, seriously, you have no idea. I have quickly become one of the most reliable and dependable people at my job by sheer virtue of being competent and confident in what I do. It's sad how in demand or rare something as common sensical as that could be. Still, this is not my own over-inflated opinion of myself, I had my yearly review yesterday and my boss pretty much lavished praise on me. I have basically worked a nine hour day for the past three months just because, well, other people can't handle work as fast or won't step up to the plate. Nine hour days suck but I'm basically used to it at this point and the money is super nice, and it was nice to be recognized for the extra I put in to get things done for our residents on time.

Health? Full of awesome! Been doing P90X for the last month and a bit. It is infinitely more reasonable on my many joints and old man easily broken parts than the Insanity regimen and the results are very good. I still have quite a ways to go before I'm at all happy with my look but I've kept off my, as of this writing, just over 25 pounds of weight loss and gotten some noticeable tone. I have never had tone before, I could get used to it. It's a worthwhile sacrifice of an hour of my day that would be spent on anything else. Here's to being in the best shape of my life as I'm just shy of turning 33.

Stuff? Things! The library is a godsend to my reading habits. I have easily read over three hundred dollars worth of books that we would have bought otherwise back when we were being ridiculous, probably closer to five hundred if I went and really looked at it. I am kept happily bookish with my usual tropes - comics, manga, and mystery novels. I still get the occasional video game from the library and I'm finally watching Bruce Timm's Justice League series thanks to their DVD collection (initial verdict - first season very average, second season thus far very good). Right now I'm reading one of my last unread Inspector Rebus novels while I wait for my next Inspector Banks to show up from interlibrary loan. Otherwise I have mostly been rotating through Inspector Banks with P.D. James' Adam Dalgliesh series. I like P.D. James quite a bit, but I find her prose very dense sometimes. It took me a lot longer to read my last one, Devices & Desires, than anything else I've read this year.

I'm also reading some Canadian detective fiction, which has been interesting so far. I know Agatha Christie is incredibly trite (I love her, but she is, she introduces characters that have essentially one character trait - the gambler, the drunk, etc) but I really miss her old school style of A-HA! parlor room revelation deduction. She crafted some of the best puzzles I've ever read. I haven't seen anybody on either side of the pond who writes quite like that. Encylopedia Brown does not count.

Gaming-wise I'm still stuck in my usual vices. World of Warcraft is still a big time-killer for me, and the latest expansion is looking to absorb even more of it for a while. Our guild has pretty much scaled back to just a group of ten of us doing the big huge raid content (for anybody who doesn't know but might care think of it as fighting Bowser in a Mario game with ten different Marios), which I'm fine with. I can more easily find ten people I like than put up with twenty-five (the other option) people when I can't stand half of them. Our ten is more or less all friends both in-game and out and that certainly helps too.

The family is also doing very well. Sherlock is adorable as all get out, which is good because he has butt and bladder issues of the stinkiest kind. He's getting better about urinating inappropriately; we added a third litter box so there's one on every level of the house and they don't get to sleep with us after he has his moments on the bed so I think it's slowly sinking in (when it does we just use carpet cleaner, HEYOOOO). Gracie continues to be suitably stoic, although when we keep her from the bed and sleeping with us she will hit the door until it opens unless we lock it fully. I think that's sweet... ish. Cassie is doing wonderfully. I am so proud of her in so many ways it would need a whole other entry to describe them. She always makes me so, so happy I changed my mind about ever getting married because it was worth everything.

I just wanted to end on a high note and they don't get much better than that. Wait, we're having pizza night tomorrow! Viva life!

My definition of love. This writing exercise is pretty keen to get its love on. Anyway. It's hard to put love into a really concise or definite place, if you ask me. And love is such a constantly changing state. Love starts when you miss somebody when you're apart and break out into stupid grins when you talk to them, at least that's how I remember it starting. Even now I still regularly miss the crap out of Cassie when I'm just at work. The point in a relationship where you're so incredibly comfortable that you can just be near each other and feel how much they care about you, that's love to me.

Wanting to be with somebody, wanting to do things for somebody just for the hell of it. And love is the bad shit too - putting up with one another's faults, not caring about the small stuff, staying devoted to each other through the big stuff. Love is a constant state of flux and it will, for most people, get proven and pushed and stretched to its limit in any number of ways. Love is really being able to come through all that and out the other side still wanting to be with that person and know them.

Love is all messy and wonderful and crazy and stuff. It's a good thing overall.

That's about as much as I got this morning. Hey, I should point out I had pizza for supper last night, not that I'm editing that entry. It was epic.

This entry is coming to you from... THE FUTURE! Just because I already know that my meal today will follow the same trajectory as all my weekday meals go. Breakfast, as always, is two packets of Quaker Instant Oatmeal, Regular Flavor, Because It's The Right Thing To Do. I dust that with a coating of sugar and enjoy, stopping afterwards so Sherlock can jump in my lap and get attention before I leave (no I do not eat him).

Pre-lunch snacking will consist of a packet or two of Pringles Wheat Sticks. I am trying the cheese flavor right now, normally I prefer the honey butter (with MSG!) or pizza ones. I will likely fit in a Honey Nut All-Bran Bar into this equation (likely meaning will) and then later on during the day I'll scoop a 1/3 of a cup of almonds out of my stash (estimated, no measuring devices of any sort in a pharmacy).

Lunch today will be a PC Blue Menu Shepherd's Pie from Loblaw's. They are delicious and quite filling. Also our microwave sucks so it will invariably nuke the edges into a delicious brown crust that I am very fond of. Later in the afternoon when my stomach starts going off again I'll grab my apple from the fridge and eat that. Pink Lady for as long as they're in season. Oh food, you're so... double-entendre.

Supper will most likely be a tuna fish sammich. Nothing too crazy. If I have a bigger lunch I try and have a smaller supper and vice-versa. Otherwise I'd likely be making PC Blue Menu Chicken Fingers and some McCain's Fries. Nom nom nom.

That's all very boring, I assure you. I count my calories all day long, trying to keep myself around 2000-ish. I'll usually have another All-Bran Bar in the evening, doubly so if I've done my crazy workout because it always makes me super hungry and I know I need more food at that point. Beverage wise I will drink a bunch of water and during the morning I will guzzle down two bottle of Diet Pepsi because we have not yet proven aspartame will kill me and I need caffeine but hate coffee and regular Pepsi/Coke is NASTY. The End.

Yeeees, the dreaded parent topic. This meme certainly doesn't start off pulling any punches, I'll give it that. I guess it's much easier for teenagers, they just write a line in their broken troglodyte language about how much they hate them and then go back to not eating their cereal and watching Jersey Shore. Look, Jersey Shore, I can still be topical, I'm not an old man yet, I swear! Oh hell.

I might as well start easy, with my dad. My dad is one of the most upstanding and outstanding men I've ever known and his commitment to his children and his family is nothing less than amazing. I don't necessarily agree with him all the time, we're two separate people after all, but as I grew older and wiser I really came to recognize what he did for all of us. Both my parents are from a very, very small fishing village in Newfoundland and they do in fact come from a long line of fisherpersons. I have never really known what inspired my father to set forth from his home and do something different, but he did, eventually ending up as an automotive mechanics instructor in the Newfoundland Community College System (I think that's what it was in the abbreviation, but I'm pretty sure it is just Defunct by now).

I take no small amount of pride in the fact that he was, when he worked, acknowledged as one of, if not the, best instructors in the province. Yes, the competing pool was smaller but big props to him. He always worked very hard to stay current and I never knew anybody who put in the effort he did for his students. I definitely see these through rose-colored glasses, but the past is awesome like that. I get a lot of my personality from my dad, he takes things seriously when he needs to but not so much otherwise. He's certainly a quieter man and I have fond memories of us engaging in pun contests when we would drive around on vacation. I guess he's to blame for that aspect of my humor although I have tried at times to leave them behind me, with marginal success.

Then, of course, there's my mother. I'm pretty sure there are enough entries from old journals filled with emo bitter feelings towards my mom, but let us have at it one more time. My mother is passive-aggressive angst wrapped up in a shell of woe betide. I am generally a cynical person, all the shit I've put up with in my life tends to broker that, but my mother gives me a run for the finish line in the 'doomed, doomed, doomed' sweepstakes. The sad part is, she never used to be that way. From all accounts, prior to having me she was confident, out-going, and generally strong. I have no memories like that of my mother. She worked for a solid ten years as a bank teller and loved it, then when I came around she stopped to be a stay at home mom.

I have nothing against that part of the story; those are fond memories and my mother knows how to dote like no other. However, the problem came when I grew up and she didn't want to accept it. My mother has always had trouble seeing me as an adult with adult problems or thoughts. I'm always just going to be her little boy and that causes problems because, again, not to be painting my nails black here, but I gave up a lot of that carefree spirit on the way up.

I almost wonder if post-partum was to blame. But the mother who raised me was nervous, skittish, and prone to anxiety attacks. It's not hard to see where I get a lot of my issues from later in life from. Mendel would have a field day with it all. To the best of my knowledge she is pretty much scared of everything ever. She knows how to lay down the guilt like a minefield and relatively innocuous conversations have been blown sky high by something she took the wrong way or whatever. Very little tolerance for things she doesn't want to understand or accept. It took a long time for her to come to terms with my obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety issues and I know she still feels more shame about them than I do. As a consequence she is much easier to take in small doses and our relationship is often rather strained. I do love her though, which I am pretty sure is the important bit.

Rather than end on that bummer, however, I think I will swing it back to my dad. Like I said, I've always been in awe of what he's done for family and I think the thing that most encapsulates that would be the last two years I was in high school when they closed his program at the campus in town and he went to Gander, some two hours away, and worked there while commuting for the first year and commuting on weekends for the second. And he did this not just for the house, since he was happy in Springdale, but so I could finish my high school diploma amongst my friends. He's an amazing guy that way.