My relatives in Calgary have this huge window in their living room that overlooks the neighborhood, and all the way across the city to the Canadian Olympic Park. I rang in the new years there watching a replay of the Times Square ball drop that had happened 2 hours previous, and looking for fireworks from COP (although I don’t remember if there were any or not). After a short, overnight trip to Banff whose highlights was swimming outdoors in below-freezing temperature, I returned to Toronto and started my first full-time job. A year later, it certainly doesn’t feel like I’ve already been at work for a year, even though these memories of January do seem very far off.

I don’t remember much from those winter months, I have a bunch of pictures from Winterlicious at Bb33 and Tundra, and the Vista Ice House in Dundas Square. I also recall my frustrating time spent pushing paper and people to make sure I actually graduated on time. March and April were no better, although it brought several visits to the TSO (1, 2, 3) and a new lens in preparation for some trips. April was also the time of the biggest news story of the year in my mind, which was the VTech shooting.

In May, the winter blues started to thaw out. I went to see the Arcade Fire at Massey Hall, a bunch of us went to NYC over the May 2-4 weekend and did a variety of stuff. It was my first time there, and it was pretty fun, this was one of the highlights of the year. Back in Toronto, we did the usual Doors Open thing, and I started taking a kindergarden Mandarin course which wrecked my Saturday morning sleep-in period for the summer.

In June, the popularity of FiD skyrocketed although I had been working just as hard on it all year. Unfortunately the AdSense cheque amounts didn’t increase with it, of which part of the reason was the increasing parity between the Canadian and US dollar (which peaked in November at almost $1.10). The art festival, Luminato was in its inaugural year and we visited several exhibits around town, and I finally graduated (now I only need to get a printed copy of my thesis). The highlight of my graduation day wasn’t that I actually graduated, but that I got to take a picture with Mike Lazaridis, the CEO of RIM and Chancellor of the University of Waterloo.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: best-of