It hasn’t been a static 7 months, but we just don’t seem to diver time to maintaining the blog a whole lot. Too bad.
Highlights…
Maria coached her first group of students to a successful ACM Programming competition, a regional level competition held locally here at Wilkes University. The King’s group managed to do better than any other group from the Wyoming-Valley – which was awesome! Next year, I expect even better results for them.
Maria has started getting priority back into recovering her physical health, going to the gym fairly regularly and such, join me in wishing her luck continuing that into 2011, mm-kay?
Maria has also managed to survive not only her first year at King’s, with glowing reviews, but her hardest semester yet. With luck she’s “over the hump” and it will start to ease up a bit now and she will able to work less than 100 hrs a week (or something like that).
Maria’s had a blast geocaching here though, she’s managed to keep that hobby going well ’nuff on the various days off. She just hit milestone 3500 when she and a some friends went out for the Christmas Cache up in mid-state New York. It was a huge long day trip, but she had a blast and that is what was important.
We took our first vacation together in quite some time, in the summer we hooked up our little camping trailer and wheeled our way up to Vermont and Maine. We spent a couple days near East Burke VT – originally so I could get some cycling in at the Kingdom Trails – alas that didn’t work out since my bike broke on the first ride. We spent the bulk of the time geocaching around the area, and into Quebec, and had a great stay. We then cruised over to the coast of Maine (just outside Southport) and had a great couple days there too. We even managed to connect with a VERY old girl-friend of Maria’s and her family one day. On the way back we stayed at an “inland cruise ship” as we called it – a Yogi Bear campground. Never again. Not a BAD place, but not “us” – too busy and too organized. It was in a nice area, not too far from La Palz NY, which we need to find our way back to.
For me, it was a year of stabilizing myself at work, changing from being a contractor- to becoming a US Postal Service employee. It was also a year of expanding my cycling horizons, I spent a lot of time doing downhill with my new friends Dave and Amy T at various chair-lift based cycling venues and learned new skills of catching air and dropping big and basically hauling butt. I’m not sure Maria is very happy with it, but I am. I look forward to doing more in 2011.
My cross-country cycling has taken a hit from all this I think, so I need to bring that back up. I’m not happy with that and I need to find a way to make both of these things work out.
It was also a sad cycling year, as both my mountain bikes broke. The one that broke in VT wasn’t a big deal, but when my 7 year old Quasi-Moto broke in September that was a saddening thing. That bike and I had been through a lot of craziness together, and it had seen me go from a cycling-hooked individual to a completely cycling-obsessed individual, had been on a number of road trips with me, and through a number of races. I’ve been able to find used stuff to ride since then, and make mine, but nothing feels yet like I have found the replacement- or worthy-successor for the Quasi-Moto. It was truly a unique machine for a special time in my life.
The best family news I had all year was when at Thanksgiving we found out that my little sister is engaged! I’m looking forward to that party next year, it ought to be fun. And it will happen merely a month after Maria and I go to Switzerland to celebrate the same thing for Maria’s dear friend Jean-Philippe when he and his gal celebrate nuptuals at his family home in June.
And that about sums up 2010, dear reader.