Good day my dear readers. If you have been a longtime follower of my blog, you may wonder where I’ve been in the past month, and if in fact I’m just eating bon-bons and kicking back through the summer. Well, quite the contrary my friends! Things have been as busy as ever, which is why there has been a marked lack of blog updates. In the past while I’ve had a lovely Canada Day paddling adventure, gone to the States for the Leadville 100 Mountain Bike Race (don’t worry, that’ll be a whole post!), changed jobs, worked on gear reviews, saw my sister and family off on a new adventure to Belgium (for the next 4 years!) AND worked on wedding preparations! Yup, I (and the ever-lovely Deanna) have been quite busy indeed, but this short post should at least serve to bring you up to speed on our latest adventures. As usual, you can find most of my pictures on flickr shortly after events, and also, Deanna is becoming a bit of a shutterbug and has her own flickr account now too! So twice the photos! Read on now for a taste of recent events.
You may have picked up on a couple ‘life events’ in that opening paragraph. Firstly, yes, we had to bid a ‘bon voyage’ to my sister Andrea and the entire family, including cool niece Helena and cool nephew Julien. They are headed over to Brussels to work at NATO for the next 4-5 years. At the moment, it is just Andrea working there, but it looks like Patrick may also get a gig there! Pretty cool to have a nice central European base of operations should we wish to head over for a visit. We’ll miss them alot, but possible Christmas plans for 2014 are already in the works. We wish them all the best and look forward to seeing them back here in October for the BIG WEDDING 🙂
Next up, the new job. Yes, I finally decided to loosen the ‘golden handcuffs’ of public service and head back into the private sector. Ostensibly, and officially, I’m on a ‘leave of absence’, but I highly doubt I’ll return. I’m already having far too much fun getting me feet wet, up to my elbows, and all those other metaphors. What am I doing? Well, I’ve become the Director of Engineering at a small boutique consulting firm, Nordicity Group Limited. We deal in various industries, mainly cultural and telecoms / ICT, and the Ottawa office is all about telecom stuff, and I’m their head technical guy. Pretty cool gig, if not high pressure. But with pressure comes profile, and I have no doubt I’ll be able to carve myself a nice niche there in the coming years!
Canada Day Paddling Adventures
Rewinding the clock just a bit, I did want to chat about an awesome paddling adventure Deanna and I made on Canada Day this year. Our tradition the past few years has been paddling on the Ottawa river and watching the fireworks. However, this year, we opted to head to Trenton to visit and spend time with family. As you all know me, I wasn’t going to be content merely sitting around drinking beers. A couple years back, Deanna mentioned she’d always wanted to paddle the Trent-Severn Waterway, which I filed in my mind. So, for the weekend, I suggested we spend a solid day out on the water. In the end, we paddled 57km in variable conditions, starting from Locks 11/12 and paddling all the way down to Trenton. Deanna’s parents were nice enough to drive us out to the start in the early morning, and even provided late-day moral support, and even ice cream at the take out!
This was a really fun adventure, and one I’ve no doubt Deanna will remember for some time. Making memories like that with the love of your life is truly special, and I’m glad we got some good pictures from the adventure! The only problem with doing something like that is that you’re never sure when or what the next adventure might be. We’ve been toying with cycling across Canada, hiking the Himalayas, etc. etc., time and money are the only real obstacles. All I know is that someday, they will all be crossed off the life adventure bucket list!
Wedding Prep Going Well
As you’ve no doubt read a couple times in this post, wedding planning is going pretty well. Things are already mostly sorted out for the big day, and we’re getting increasingly excited. One of the primary preoccupations we’ve got is ensuring all our guests are well entertained and sufficiently hydrated. To those ends, we recently bottled the two batches of wine that we had specially made for the big day. In fact, we were bottling the very morning we were flying out to Denver for my big race in Leadville! We had the opportunity to sample both the red and the white, and I can assure you that both are quite tasty, and eminently drinkable 🙂 I’ll be surprised if we come back home with too many bottles after the wedding. Now that I have your attention, if any of you are reading this and haven’t yet RSVP’d, please take a moment to do so now 😉
Last but not least, another fun thing we did recently was head out on the kayaks again to witness the spectacle that if Flugtag Ottawa, put on by Red Bull. There are plenty of pictures of that as well, but we haven’t gotten around to posting them yet. Suffice to say, it was a gorgeous day on the water, and quite entertaining to watch all the flying machines try to get airborne, but ultimately end up waterlogged and craned out of the river!
That’s it for my brief update. I’m really hoping that I’ll get around to writing up the experience that was Leadville in the near future, but I have to make sure I do the event justice. It was amazing! Stay tuned friends…
