How I Spent My 35th Birthday

   Yesterday, Feb. 8th, was my 35th Birthday. Normally I'd mark the anniversary of my birth by writing out a rambling blog about what I've done or learned in the past year and how I feel about getting older, but not this year. This year I decided to just get out of the house and go for a walk along Victoria's waterfront, specifically the Dallas Road and Ogden Point area. It's been a while since I've been down there, and you know, I didn't even care that it rained.

   My old compact camera doesn't take photos as well as today's fancy cameras, but I did get a few nice shots along my walk that I'd like to share with you. I'll write brief descriptions below each image.

The view from Dallas Road looking roughly South by Southeast. Contrast and brightness have been edited. The ship on the horizon is one of Canada's Kingston class coastal defense ships, likely crewed by Naval Reserve officers and eager young cadets, on a routine training cruise. Any given day there could be several of these little ships out there. It's fun to watch them do rescue drills and play hide-and-seek with submarines.

A wider view looking Southeast from Dallas Rd. That little ship is now just a dot on  the horizon.

The Ogden Point Breakwater.

The lighthouse at the end of the breakwater.

This is the MV Dry Beam. She limped into Victoria this past weekend after suffering damage from a rogue wave on her port (left) side while on her way to Asia.

A closer look at the ship's damaged port side. Note the bent vertical support beams and shifted load of logs. The news report said the ship was in the open Pacific just outside of Vancouver Island and that the wave was 10 to 15 meters tall. Basically Mother Nature just bitch-slapped this ship and there was nothing the crew could do the prevent it. Fortunately nobody was hurt. The huge, black white and red Seaspan cranes towering over the ship's grey cranes are on a barge docked next to the ship and are in the process of transferring the logs off the ship.

Just as I was about to leave Ogden Point, this rainbow appeared over the harbour. What a nice way to end my walk!

And that was how I spent my 35th Birthday.

The Wandering Oak

...Three...Four!

   Tomorrow is February 8th, which might already be today wherever you are in the world reading this, and I'm celebrating my 34th birthday. I share my birthday with my very good friend Jennifer and I must pause here for the obligatory shout out.

Happy Birthday, Jennifer!!! I sure hope the card I mailed her got there in time.

   I'm okay with getting older. The way I see it, I'm still young enough to have fun in life, but I'm old enough to be smart about it. Adult responsibilities like having a job, being a good husband, and paying my bills and mortgage take priority of course, but I can still cut loose and have fun with my friends once in a while. Such was the case this past weekend when some friends of ours came by for a little pre-birthday party and I got delightfully inebriated. Pictures will appear on my facebook page soon enough. When I wasn't getting up for another drink, or to mingle, I played my guitar for most of the evening and must have sounded better than I give myself credit for. One friend actually told me I sounded so close to the songs I was covering he forgot it was me playing! I'll take that as a compliment, thank you!

   In all honesty I can ask for nothing more for my birthday than that. The feeling I get from having such great friends and family, and of course my beautiful wife. I really wouldn't be me without all of you.

   Okay, I must confess, there is one thing I look forward to on my birthday, the bombardment of greetings I get on my facebook page. I'm sure most of you can relate. All year long you do your best to acknowledge every one's birthdays no matter how well you know them on facebook or in the real world, and then you get that one day out of 365 (or 366 on a leap year) where it seems like the Internet revolves around you. It feels pretty good doesn't it? Or is it just me?

   So again to my friend Jennifer, and anyone else born on Feb. 8th, Happy Birthday!

I leave you with a great quote I got from a cousin of mine (not sure where he got it from), "Nice guys finish last... cause we're too busy helping others get there first."

The Wandering Oak

33

   It was 33 years ago today at about 7:40pm at Campbell River General Hospital that I took my first breath of air, and all these years later I'm happy to still be breathing. I've got to say my 30's have been good to me so far.

   I've done more with my life in the first 3 years of my 30's than I ever did with the last 5 years of my 20's.

   I changed careers. I spent pretty much all of my 20's bouncing from one customer service job to another. I even did a 4 year stand at a call centre for a big American cell phone company and lived to tell about it - though I still cringe every time I see one of their commercials on TV. While I learned a lot from each of those jobs and made many, many great friends along the way, none of those jobs turned out to be as rewarding as I initially hoped they would be and often left me feeling like something was missing in my life. So, I left that industry right before my 30th birthday, took some special training and safety courses, and now I have a very rewarding job in the trades that I actually feel happy telling people about. (Trust me, that call centre had such a bad reputation that when I told people where I worked they would look at me as though I just told them I had a terminal illness and tell me they were sorry to hear that. It's true!)

   I moved home. Growing up my family often moved back and forth from BC to Alberta and I've actually spent most of my life in Alberta, but BC was always home to me. My wife is also from BC, and after about 9 years of living in Edmonton we both started feeling really homesick. So, in 2007 we packed all of our worldly possessions into a U-Haul truck, bid tearful goodbyes to our friends, and headed back over the mountains. We may not be living in my hometown of Campbell River, but Victoria is only a 3 hour drive down the Island. It's so much nicer to be closer to our families and, let's face it; the winters out here are so much milder than they were back in Edmonton. My job has given me the opportunity to work on so many different projects around Victoria that I really feel like I've become a part of this city. "I painted that!"

   I got married. Sure my wife and I have been a couple since meeting in high school and that was centuries ago, but in 2008 we decided to make it official by tying the knot in a beautiful and intimate barefoot-on-the-beach ceremony in Oahu, Hawaii. It was the happiest day of my life. Actually it was the happiest week of my life. I consider myself a pretty lucky guy to have someone like her in my life and to this day wonder what I did to be worthy of such an amazing woman.

   So what's next for my 30's? Well I don't really know for sure, but if the next 7 years are anything like the last 3 years I can imagine there will be some big changes. One thing I can say is that my wife and I are planning on becoming home owners and not just renters, so let's hope that happens. Other than that? Well the future is wide open.

   Before I go, I'd like to give a special greeting to my very good friend Jennifer who is also celebrating her birthday today. We've known each other for a few years now (four-five?) and in that time I've come to think of her as one of the nicest people I know. It's amazing how comfortable we are talking with each other about practically anything and our online chats on MSN can and will usually go off in all different directions. Maybe I should start saving them and posting them as blogs... So to my friend Jennifer, have yourself a very happy birthday and I hope you get spoiled rotten. You deserve it!

Now I'm going to go enjoy my day. Have a great day, my friends!

The Wandering Oak