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2012: My Year In A Nutshell

December 28, 2012 By

2012 was an eventful year for me. It featured some highlights, and some definite lowlights.

January… I receive a new training plan from my friend Phaedra, who I have enlisted as my coach for the coming year. My training does not start well, though: on the day I am supposed to do my first run in the schedule, I come down with the mother of all stomach bugs.

February… I receive a devastating phone call: my beloved aunt Ann has died in a freak accident. I fly to South Africa to lend support to my mom and say my farewells to Ann. It is intensely emotional. I cannot believe that someone who has been such a big part of my life since I was born is no more.

March… I am back from South Africa, and my training can finally get underway properly. I feel like I am back on track, and ready for my first race of the season.

April… I run two races and make personal best times in both of them. On the same day as the Toronto Yonge Street 10K, another person dear to my heart passes away. Margaret, who was a phenomenal actress – a far better Shirley Valentine than the original Shirley Valentine –  has succumbed to cancer.

May… I survive a major organizational restructuring at work. I am shuffled to a new manager, but in an environment where people I know well and work closely with are being let go, I manage to keep my job.

June… I am admitted to the Professional Writers Association of Canada (PWAC). This is a big, big deal for me. I want to get into the freelance writing business, and this affiliation will help me enormously.

July… The kids are done with school. James has finished Grade 1 and George has completed Grade 3. We find a rare gem: a reliable and dedicated respite worker. The boys take to her quickly. They respond well to her kindness and natural intuition with kids.

August… I run the Midsummer Nights Run 15K on a course that has been my personal nemesis. Instead of crashing and burning like I have in every other race along the Leslie Street spit, I find that thing known to runners as The Zone. I run a great race and beat my previous best time by 14 minutes.

September… The kids go back to school, and although I worry about the transition for both of them, they adjust well to being back. At work, I manage my first implementation since being assigned as Implementation Lead for my project. There are some glitches but it goes well. It counts as a big virtual checkmark against my career. George turns nine. Where has the time gone?

October… This is an eventful month. I run my fourth annual autism run, raising a personal record amount for the Geneva Centre for Autism and running a personal best half-marathon time. The following weekend, I attend my first Blissdom conference and make many, many new writer friends. And the week after that, I attend the Geneva Centre for Autism symposium, and learn a ton of new things.

November… I meet with both of the boys’ teachers. George is progressing as well as he can at school, considering that he is a child with autism adjusting to a completely new school environment. James is struggling with his reading, and a plan is put in place to help him.

December… I celebrate completing my 43rd orbit around the sun on the same day we throw a birthday party for James. I run my final race of the season – the Tannenbaum 10K – and have a great deal of fun. I get all teary-eyed as I watch live-streaming of my friend Margie’s graduation that she worked so hard to accomplish. The world fails to end. James turns seven. Where has the time gone?

Some big things are in store for 2013. I have some lofty goals and I am quite excited to get started on them. I was going to make them a part of this post, but decided that 2013 deserves a post all of its own.

Watch this space to see what’s afoot for the New Year…

(Photo credit: Carlos Van Vegas. This picture has a creative commons attribution license.)

Filed Under: 2012 Year in Review, Children, running, Work, Writing Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
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I Survived A Stressful Week Without Going Completely Insane

May 19, 2012 By

I am participating in the 2012 Wordcount Blogathon, which means one post every day for the month of May.

This last week has been fraught with stress. Along with almost everybody in my department, I spent the first half of the week waiting to hear whether I still had a job. I work for a large corporation, and they do these organizational shuffles from time to time, and invariably not everyone survives these. While we knew that this reorganization was underway, no-one was telling us anything. Throughout Monday and Tuesday, several familiar faces quietly disappeared. And those of us who remained were wondering who would be next.

On Wednesday, the new organizational charts were finally released. I had a brief moment of panic when I couldn’t immediately find my name, but located it under a new manager. I was not thrilled about that – I loved my previous manager – but at least I was there, doing more or less the same work I’ve been doing.

On the same day, I received notification that I had been accepted into the Professional Writers Association of Canada as an associate member. This was big news indeed: it gives me access to all kinds of tools and people that could help me in my quest to get a foothold in the freelance writing business.

While all of this has been going on, I have been trying to resolve some technical issues that have been preventing the upload of my new website. Last night I had to log onto a couple of sites, and click a couple of buttons that would finalize the transfer of my domain name to a new registrar.

My website broke.

I went into emergency fix mode, calling customer support lines and harassing my long-suffering website developer. I was able to put in place a band-aid fix, which will work just fine until my new website is uploaded after the weekend.

Then my email broke – the email that’s associated with the domain name.

It didn’t take me long to figure out what needed to be done. I had to kill off the email address in one place and recreate it in another. Which meant that I first had to sift through the emails in the old place to figure out which ones I wanted to keep. And we all know that nobody keeps their inboxes nice and tidy, right?

Sheesh.

I got the email address set up in one place, but now it would appear that I didn’t succeed in fully killing it off in the old place. So the Internet thinks the email address exists in two places. While I’m getting most mail in the new place and none at all in the old place, there is the odd message that simply doesn’t get delivered. Kind of like lost snail mail.

I am trying to muddle through and sort all of this out while coming down from a week of stress.

And deal with an autism meltdown that happened this morning when George couldn’t find his box of DVDs.

All of this is happening as I go a bit mental leading into the final week before my half-marathon.

At least everything that’s happening is, in some way, a step in the right direction. I still have a job. My writing career took a big leap. The infrastructure is in place for my new website, and I can always change my email address.

Even George’s meltdown was a positive thing, because he was able to communicate what the trigger was.

I am ready for a relaxing weekend, and I hope that anyone reading will relax right along with me.

Filed Under: 2012 Wordcount Blogathon, life, Stress, Technology Tagged With: , , , , , , ,