Holy crapola!

It's been forever since I posted here - for multiple reasons (or excuses) - including, um, summer, boys, travel, focusing on the other blogs and Facebook instead, summer, boys, travel...

I skitted home for a week at the end of June for my mom and dad's 40th wedding anniversary just as the heat wave was warming up in BC, jumped to Montreal for August long weekend just as the heat wave peaked and British Columbia was seemingly entirely on fire, and just got back from a long weekend in Los Angeles visiting friends during a party weekend event over yet-another-missed-in-Vancouver long weekend. In between all that I've been trying to work, look for new work, meet people in my new city, and host a lot of old friends coming through Vancouver on vacation from points east. All in all it's been a crazy busy summer and not-so-surprisingly it has sort of blown by.

I have been keeping up pretty good cycling and running form this summer, doing lots of climbing in North Vancouver. The cycling highlight of the summer was definitely the climb day up Mount Baker in Washington State. Hard to believe that the track cycling season here starts in a couple of weeks. It boils down to a very different racing schedule than what I've become accustomed to over the past decade. I'm really looking forward to racing indoors over the winter though....should be a lot of fun to meet an entirely new group of people....well, not entirely new. There are a lot of ex-Alberta pats out on the wet coast, so it seems.

I'm flying to Toronto over the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend to catch the Kylie Minogue concert. I've been a huge fan since the 80s and almost herniated when I found out she was finally touring North America for the first time. Despite her relative low-letter-list status here, she still has lots of die-hard fans here and they have filled most of the dates on her six-city tour. There are still tickets available for Toronto though, so it is not sold out yet.

It was only by accident that I decided to go to Toronto. Other options were L.A., Las Vegas and Chicago, but none of the dates really fell anywhere that I would be able to integrate a minimal number of vacation days in order to get a reasonable number of days away. Toronto was the option that looked best. It was only after I bought the concert and flight tickets and talked to friends in Montreal that I realized it was also Thanksgiving long weekend...which also means....Black & Blue weekend in Montreal! Yipe! Too much suddenly going on. I ran into my friend Paul from Toronto while in Montreal and he informed me about the tentative itinerary for the long weekend, which I anxiously wanted to be a part of. Hopefully that all works out.

Air Canada had a kickass seat sale on a couple of months ago where I managed to get the flights from Vancouver to Toronto and return for $380.....super cheap. At the same time I booked my flight back to Calgary for family Xmas in November for $230. Super cheap.

Unfortunately the American destinations did not come across as cheap. I had to pay more for the Vancouver - Los Angeles flights than I wanted to (with disgusting flight times and transfers as a result of still trying to book as cheap a flight as possible). For the Chicago trip in November, I decided just to use Aeroplan miles. $80 instead of $750, yeah I can dig it.

So what's on the travel agendy for 2009? Time will tell. I already have some obligations to get down to Seattle and Portland ASAP, Palm Springs at the beginning of February, Phoenix and Houston/Rio Grande Valley around the same time, Chicago in the spring, in addition to the big Tour of Germany (Frankfurt-Cologne-Dusseldorf-Amsterdam-Hamburg-Berlin-Prague-Vienna-Munich-Frankfurt) I would like to do coinciding with the Gay Games in August next year. Of course this all hinges on where exactly I'll be working in 2010. My current role is done at the end of October and I am sort of hoping not to get a renewal so I can get a package and embark on a new path with a new organization. I guess we'll what happens soon enough.

If the job market isn't looking that stellar at that time, I'm planning to do some skill upgrading in January/February for Sharepoint/MOSS 2007 Administration, and maybe, just maybe, keep my options open to be available for the Winter Olympics in February/March.

On top of that, I'm dating a wonderful guy. We're spending inordinate amounts of time trying to figure each other out, which is leading to a lot of days of exhaustion, but smiles on our faces. We'll see how this all develops, so far so good.

Anyhoo, just wanted to put some filler in here. Not sure when I'll next post, but FB is where I am most of the time now. Plus some of my other blogs garner a lot more traffic and interest from me.