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Category: Personal miscellany

Marc-Andre

25 years ago in June 1995, my best friend and I went on a life-changing journey across Canada (well, the western half at least). It was my first trip anywhere without my family, I think it was his as well. 

We bought a 30-day Greyhound pass, packed our backpacks, and set off.  We spent 150+ hours on the bus over three weeks, and hit every major city (and a lot of little road-side truck stops) from Ottawa to Vancouver and back.

We went to prom with a friend in Winnipeg, we spent Canada Day on Prince’s Island in Calgary, we mall-ratted in Edmonton, hiked a mountain in Jasper, were awestruck by the city of glass, and we took a rest in Banff before the long trek home. 

We slept on the bus when we could, stayed in youth hostels wherever we stopped, and we met travellers from around the world. When we couldn’t pronounce their names, we would just refer to them as their country (“Hey Germany, where we going tonight?”). They would teach us about their home countries, and help us see our own through new eyes.

We made memories for a lifetime. I would go on to develop a love of travel, and would take those experiences with me everywhere I’d go. We would have many more shared experiences in life, but that trip west is what first truly cemented our relationship. 

As the years passed, that trip would be a touchstone in both our lives. 

Two and a half decades, our friendship ebbing and flowing as friendships do, we always had that trip, and we always knew that no matter how much time had passed, we would forever be connected through that experience.

Marc passed away suddenly this weekend. We had not communicated in many years, I feel awful about that. But I think of that trip today, as I have many times over the years, as I know he did as well. That trip would shape our friendship and our lives together and apart.

What a long and crazy trip it’s turned out to be.
I miss you buddy.
Rest in peace.

Goodbye sweet girl…

Dexy guarding my shoes

I guess 18 years was just enough. She made it all the way through her birthday month, but unfortunately we had to say goodbye to our dear sweet Dexy tonight. She’s been my best friend and constant companion for more than 17 years. From the moment she appeared at my grocery store as a runaway with boundless energy and that great big smile, she has held my heart. She saw me through lots of rough times and she brought me endless amounts of joy. She was a part of our family and we will all miss her dearly. Goodnight my sweet girl.

Not what I had in mind

So a while back I added a plugin and setup my blog to collect my tweets each week and aggregate them into a weekly post like the ones below. My thought then was that since I publish quite a bit at Twitter and not so much here, these weekly posts would keep this blog a bit more active in the long spaces between my postings here.

Unfortunately, it’s turned out that I’ve ended up with weeks and weeks and weeks of aggregate posts of tweets that crowd out what little actual content I publish here, and it’s just gotten out of hand – I no longer believe it’s useful to collect those here, since if you wanted to read my tweets, you’d follow me over on Twitter.  Plus I just find the posts are uglying up the place.

This blog is in a weird space for me right now. I love having it, and I do publish here a lot more when I have stuff going on like Bluesfest, Burning Man, or the Toronto Film Festival. The rest of the time, I’m still active online, just not here – I tend to push lots of links and short-form stuff to Twitter, my Tumblr log has been seeing lots of action recently, and I have lots of stuff going to my Google Reader list, not to mention places like Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and now of course there’s Google Buzz that all fill different spaces in my online life.

Ideally I’d like to find a way of pulling all of that stuff together to represent my online identity in some cohesive way, and I think that’s what I was attempting with the aggregate posts, but that obviously hasn’t worked.

So I’m discontinuing the weekly aggregate posts here, and though I can’t really promise that I’ll write more to fill in the gaps (we know how that usually works out), I am going to try to find a better way to integrate my other online activity here. In the meantime, here are some links to the places where I am active to varying degrees online:

My Google Profile
My Google Reader Shared Items
My Facebook Profile
My Flickr Photostream
FineDiners.ca, my foodie blog
My Twitter Stream
My Tumblr Log
My LinkedIn
My YouTube Channel

My Tumblr Experiment

Over the past week I’ve started playing around with micro-blogging system Tumblr (see my Tumblelog here).  I’ve been using it to post images and quotes and videos and short links that I normally wouldn’t publish here and are not really appropriate for Twitter – stuff that when crammed into url shorteners and reduced to 140 chars just don’t really work.

I admit that I’m kinda spreading my online publishing a little thin between this site, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and etc, but I haven’t figured out if this fills in some little niche that wasn’t previously addressed, or if I’m just being silly and caught up in the newness (to me) of it, but I’m having fun with it and wanted to share it here.

Ideally all of this stuff will eventually come together somewhere (probably here in some form) to consolidate my online identity.  I’ve been playing around with ideas and really that’s what this is about – playing and learning and having fun – this is a personal site after all, and these are the things I’m interested in.  For now, check out my Tumblr for quick posts and images and silliness, this site for my travels and interests and longer form content, YouTube and Flickr for obvious reasons, and for a semi-constant stream of what I’m up to, follow me on Twitter.  Oh, and I almost forgot about my shared items on Google Reader.

I promise someday this will all make sense in a more cohesive context.