I have been so caught up in work lately that I think I more or less missed the memo that we are turning over a decade in a few days. This past decade has been a roller coaster.

Amazing highs and devastating lows.

Laughter and tears.

Successes and failures.

2010 was the year I did my first 365 photography project, and I did a few more after that. I thought it might be interesting to go back through each year of the past decade and look at my favourite photos. What did they say about the year, about me, and about where I was and what I was thinking? They aren’t necessarily my best photos, but they please me either because of their composition or their meaning.

So here goes.

2010

The year started off well. We had a shiny new truck, and we renovated the kitchen in the condo. We took a train to Seattle for a few days and enjoyed the city and all it offers. The Olympics arrived in town and Vancouver was a giant party filled with visitors from around the world.It was fabulous! I flew out to Thunder Bay to spend a week with my best friend and Canada won the Olympic gold in hockey the day I arrived. I learned a lot about my cameras and started to see the world in greater detail. When I was at a loss for what to take a photo of, the cats and the kitchen usually came to the rescue. We finally gained enough seniority to get the boat into a slip at the yacht club we’d joined three years earlier. I graduated from the scooter and bought a motorcycle after discovering, through Kirk’s badgering me to take lessons, that I actually wanted one…though the scooter will always be more fun to ride in the city. As fall passed through, we took a quick trip up to Kamloops and visited Adam’s River to see the sockeye. I applied for a number of different jobs in the federal government, with DFO, and never got beyond getting into a pool of qualified applicants – I jumped the hurdles but never managed to cross the finish line first. I decided that I’d had enough and would finish off one more contract in the early part of the new year, and then I’d be done with it and look for a new horizon.

2011

The year started with a message that a Flickr friend had been lost. We visited family in Cranbrook for Easter, and I spent a great deal of time trying to think about what I was going to do with my life now that I’d given up on DFO…only to get a call in late spring offering me an 18 month term position in the job I’d originally wanted. A trip to Mexico in later May-early June came just before I started the job. I rode the motorcycle and scooter every chance I could and we participated in the toy run. We played tourist in our own city and two of my photos at the Bloedel Conservatory were chosen for use as postcards in the gift shop. I rediscovered Fluevogs, and have spent far too much money on them since. Work was a dream and I got my feet wet (literally) on the rivers. I went to a fish conference in Victoria in early December and was thrilled to be surprised by the attendance of one of my best lab-friends. We went to Seattle for the motorcycle show in mid-December, then Mom came and spent Christmas with us to round out the year.

2012

2012 brought a couple of trips to Seattle, our sister city, for leisure. We like to visit, poke around the market, visit our favourite restaurant/wine bar (Purple), wander the cobble streets and just generally relax. Work saw me travelling on the ferries a lot, again. We lost Auntie Clara in January, and then Bob passed away a few months later. Kirk threw himself off a minibike on the track out in Chilliwack and was rewarded with a metal plate and a dozen screws in his collarbone for his efforts. With riding off the menu for awhile, we played Vancouver tourist, and then played tourists in the French Riviera – visiting Antibes, Cannes, Nice, Grasse, and a few other little towns along the coast. Mom came to visit in the summer, for a few days, and we hopped a ferry to visit Victoria for a day. We did a bit of boating, added to the Fluevog collection, and went on some epic motorcycle rides. We visited the family in Cranbrook for Thanksgiving and, about a month later, the world came crashing in on us as Mom had her stroke and died less than two weeks later. Kirk did his best to keep me going and we made another trip to Seattle to distract ourselves….and I fell in love with a new motorcycle to round out the year.

2013

An eventful year, 2013 started with another trip to Seattle to unwind, followed by work trips, and then a trip to Prince George for the heartbreaking task of emptying out Mom’s house and handing the keys over to the new owner. Some local motorcycle rides, one to Whistler to watch a friend endure Tough Mudder. The we took an epic week to ride down the foggy coast to the bottom of Oregon before turning inland and riding back up along the volcano route, in a smoke filled world, with stops in at Crater Lake, Mt. Hood, Mt. Ranier, and Mt. St. Helen’s. A trip to Bella Coola and Bella Bella that included bears, boats, whales, and amazing people, and fabulous trips to Vancouver Island during the rainy months. As October came to a close, we took possession of our new home, on Edgemont Blvd. The cats took it in stride, finding the warm spots and falling n love with the fireplace. And as we moved in, we found Mom’s Christmas pudding in the freezer, a leftover from when she’d come to stay in 2011….and we discovered that we actually enjoy it. We rounded out the end of the year by signing the paperwork to sell the condo and breathed a sigh of relief at not owning two homes for more than a couple of months.

2014

The fifth year of the decade opened with another train ride south to Seattle and a continuation of the never ending stress of my term position being tenuous following the axing of the Habitat program by the Harper government. The huge number of people affected meant that my job was always on the line because I wasn’t indeterminate. Another trip to Seattle in the summer was warranted because we couldn’t get tickets to see New Order in Vancouver, but they had another venue booked to the south of us a few days later, so off we went. We explored our new neighbourhood, found the pitch and putt course, did some canning now that I had a pantry, although we also gutted the main floor when Brian undertook our renovations, and the cats loved having an outdoor space. Kirk had a quick trip to Montreal and I tagged along, and had myself dropped off in Ottawa for a few hours too. In August, we jumped on the motorcycles and headed north to meet Hans at Rearguard Falls. We rode and camped together for a few days before parting ways in Cranbrook; we carried on separately after Kirk and I spent a couple of days visiting family. Fall brought more fisheries travels, and winter brought a conference in Pendleton, and the year closed softly with a little bit of snow.