It’s only natural that as one year ends and another begins that we stop and reflect on where we were and what we accomplished, especially since – if you believe the Mayans – we all have less than a year left anyway.  With that in mind, indulge me while I look back on the lasting memories of 2011.

Those of you who follow DanOCan.com on Facebook will have already seen this video, but if I had to summarize the entire year in five minutes or less this is what it would look like:

January

The Seventh Annual Geocacher Breakfast was held at the Priddis Cafe and Grill.  It was a tremendous success and 32 different Geocaching accounts logged in as attendees – tying the 2006 event as the second most attended of the annual breakfast events.  It’s not easy to get a group of people to drive out into the country in the early hours of a Saturday morning in the dead of winter.

The other January highlight was heading out to visit the Sharples elevator and the Springwater schoolhouse.  Although I have been to these sites multiple times over the last five years, it is always great to see them again – even if our route to Springwater had to be modified because of drifting snow on the main road.

February

Snowshoeing was the activity of the month for February.  Graham and I completed a fairly significant trek on the Tom Snow Trail in Kananaskis.  Shirley and I also found time to attend the Titanic exhibit at the Calgary Science Center.  (Sorry, I can’t bring myself to call it Telus World of Science or Telus Spark as it is now known.)

March

More snowshoeing was in order – it seems like we had an awfully large amount of snow this Spring.  When we weren’t out exploring the best of Kananaskis Country I managed to find time to stop in to see my old friends at Redwood Meadows Emergency Services as they took delivery of their new tender truck.

April

A lot of our time in April was taken up by our kitchen renovation.  We did manage to find time for a road trip to visit the old Bottrel General Store, however. 

We also managed to squeeze in a road trip down to Lethbridge to visit my family for Easter – naturally along the way I felt the urge to stop in at the town of Monarch which is well on its way to becoming a ghost town since the Crowsnest Highway was realigned to bypass the town several years ago. 

And, of course, April marked the Calgary Cache and Release Spring 2011 event and the world was introduced to “Team Short Bus” for the first time…

May

April showers are supposed to bring May flowers but May downpours bring flooding.  We watched with bated breath as the water levels of the nearby creeks continued to rise and eventually spilled over the banks and flooded over the road.  Unlike the floods of 2005 we didn’t suffer any damage or losses but our sump pumps were working overtime to keep the water at bay until things dried out.  We also entered into the final stages of our kitchen renovation and were ready to put our house back into some semblance of order.

Flooding

June

June was a busy month as well.  We went to see Supertramp at the Saddledome and then started our major summer vacation of the year – three weeks of RV’ing on Vancouver Island.  We absolutely fell in love with the Metchosin area and decided we’ll retire there one day.  In between multiple meals of fish and chips we even managed to squeeze in a few good hikes, most notably to the top of Mount Manuel Quimper and out to Ripple Rock.

July

There was no rest for the wicked in July.  We barely had time to unpack from our vacation before it was time to head off to Saskatchewan for the annual Ghost Town Convention.  Having missed the previous year I was looking forward to this event more than normal and it did not disappoint.  After leaving Shirley at her sister’s place in Saskatoon I carried on solo to Humboldt where I dumped the trailer before joining the event in Marysburg.  Out of the four GTCs I have attended this was the best one by far. 

Rather than trying to pick two or three pictures from the 100s I took that weekend, I figured I’d just repost the slideshow I made shortly after the event.

The other notable event in July was nearly breaking my ankle only a week after summiting Ha Ling Peak near Canmore.  I had to compensate for my lack of mobility by finally taking a trip out to see the elevator at Farrow.  It was a good thing I did because the owner would burn the elevator down (for “safety” reasons) just five months later.

August

August was a month of transition.  I was promoted to Manager of Service Operations at the University, earning the promotion I had been wanting for the past five years.  I was finally able to bid farewell [mostly] to the day-to-day systems administration work I had done for the last decade and take the next step in my career.  It was nice to be able to do it with the same organization I have spent so much time with.

I also transitioned from hobbled sore-ankle dude back into a hiker.  I celebrated my return to action with a solo hike up Cox Hill.  We also started to see the first signs of Autumn creeping into the landscape leading me to get out and start doing some photography work in the evenings again.  I also managed to add a road trip to Dorothy and attend a Geocache event on the summit of Mount Burke.  Oh yeah, I also reached my highest summit so far by completing the climb to the top of Mount Allan.  Sometimes you just can’t fit enough living into one summer, you know?

September

Highlights from this month?  Whew!  Shirley’s family all came to our place for the Labour Day long weekend as we hosted the Waddell family reunion.  That was a tremendous amount of fun.  I went out and did some night photography at a friend’s farm near Millarville.  And, to top it off I completed my longest hike ever when I reached the location of the former Forgetmenot Fire Lookout and then went to Railway Days at Heritage Park.

October

Hmm, yet another road trip – this time to check out abandoned places in the SE corner of Alberta.  And, yes, another hike – this time up Canyon Creek to finally find a cache called “Pika Cave” which I had wanted to do for the last five years.  2011 was definitely a year for accomplishing goals that had remained on my plate for far too long.

November

Our only sad event of the year was the death of our beloved cat Nona.  We had her for 12 years and she suddenly was struck down by an arterial thrombosis embolism (ATE).  It was tough to say goodbye but we always knew the day would come, we just didn’t expect it this year.  That was a tough event. 

The month ended on a happier note as we flew to Vancouver to attend the 99th Grey Cup game where the hometown BC Lions beat the Winnipeg Blue Bombers to win the championship.

December

Wow, and here we are.  The last month of the year.  After a quiet Christmas at home we went back to Lethbridge to visit my family again and to also pay a visit to the oldest grain elevator in the province in Raley.

I have NO idea what 2012 holds in store for me.  I know it will have a very hard time living up to 2011 and what a wonderful year it was.  Here’s hoping the Mayans are wrong and we’re all still here one year from now and I’m looking back at 2012 and talking about how great of a year it was. 

If I learned anything in 2011 it is to not delay trying to achieve your goals.  None of us are guaranteed anything and so you have to take advantage of every day you are given.  “Timing is everything” –- as a good friend of mine said this year during the Ghost Town Convention.  Make the most of your time in 2012.

Happy new year, everyone!

It ended exactly as I expected.  I just hadn’t expected it to happen this soon.  Twelve years and one day after it started it came to a sudden end.  Whenever we bring a pet into our lives we know at some point we will likely be faced with the decision we all regret, the decision that says it is time to end the suffering – to do what is right for the animal, not what is right for us.

Before we can ever reach an end there has to be a beginning.  For me that beginning was my 27th birthday – November 18, 1999.  I was presented with a small gift bag and when I opened it I found a small calico kitten staring up at me.  She was so small my first reaction was to ask “Is she even old enough to be away from her mother?”  She was, but just barely.  She was exactly six weeks of age, a small bundle of fur shocked and scared and wondering why she had been taken from the warmth of her mother and driven from a small farm north of Airdrie to our house in Calgary.

She would eventually be known as Nona.  That name wouldn’t come for several days, however.  At first we simply couldn’t decide what to call her.  One evening I happened to joke that if we didn’t come up with a name soon we should just call her “No Name” – “NoNa” for short.  With one flippant statement she had been christened, although we would tell people it was a tribute to Nonna’s which was one of our favourite pizza restaurants in Vauxhall, AB.

There are so many memories from those early days.  That first night I was getting up every hour to look for her and to make sure she was doing OK.  I remember we placed her litter box in the basement and she was too tiny to navigate the stairs – a fact we didn’t clue into until she had an accident on the newspaper under the kitchen table.

I also remember the first time she caught a mouse.  It was in the bathroom basement and she had been playing with it on the floor until we eventually trapped it under a cup and relocated it to the country. Nona kept making pawing motions at the housecoat that was on the floor and we commented “Ah, isn’t that cute?  She thinks the mouse is still in there.”  Imagine our shock when we picked the housecoat up and a second mouse fell onto the floor.  She knew it all along and just couldn’t figure out why we were so stupid.

Nona would have to tolerate us and our annoying habits on many occasions.  I’m sure she never understood why we insisted on taking her camping, or hooking her up to a leash when she was outside on the deck.  After all, there was so much yard to explore, why couldn’t she run free?  She never did learn to enjoy baths, although we never passed up a chance to humiliate her further by taking all sorts of pictures when she was all soaking wet.

It’s not that we were the only troublemakers in our household.  One day she decided to take a running jump onto the kitchen table – she slid   right off the edge and crashed into one of the kitchen chairs which then toppled over backwards and into the kitchen window, shattering it. 

One day she also managed to get one of her claws caught in the drywall, and had to stand there with one paw stuck up in the air until one of us heard her cries and came to her rescue. 

I can’t count the number of times she would crawl down behind the couch in the trailer and drop into one of the storage compartments.  Again, she would have to stay there [not-so] patiently waiting until one of us would pop open the door and release her from her self-imposed prison.

Oh, she could annoy us to no end.  She loved computers.  You couldn’t sit at a keyboard without having her plop down on it, or grab at the cord of the mouse causing it to rip right out of your hands.  Many times we would come home to find our laptops in a frozen state because the keyboard buffer was full because she had a nap on the keys.  We simply got in the habit of putting the lid partway down to prevent this sort of thing. 

Even now, as I sit here typing this I expect her to jump onto my desk and step in front of the monitor, obscuring my screen.  She would always rub against the LCD and leave large amounts of fur stuck all over it.  She never liked having to share our attention with anything else.  Of course, that was when *she* was in the mood for it.  Try to sit with her when she didn’t want to and you were likely to be met with a hiss and a swat.  Clearly we spoiled that cat and gave her a ton of attitude.

Whenever she would do something we didn’t like, such as scratching the couch or pouncing on us on weekend mornings when we were trying to sleep in, I would always comment “Oh, some day we’re going to miss this.  Some day we’ll be wishing she was here to bug us.”

“Some day” finally came yesterday.  I came in from the garage after a long hike.  I dropped my backpack on the stairs and walked into the kitchen ready to start cooking dinner.  As soon as I came in I knew something was wrong.  Shirley was there holding Nona who was all wrapped up in a towel.  The tears were already flowing and she told me “Something’s wrong with Nona – she can’t walk.” 

I figured this was the typical female over-reaction so I took the cat from her and laid her on the table.  I opened the blanket.  Nona looked perfectly fine.  Then she tried to get up but she couldn’t move either of her back legs.  She was paralyzed and was clearly experiencing pain.  At that moment I knew “the day” had come.  This was not good.

We wrapped her up and took off into the city to a 24-hour vet clinic.  Shirley always told me how on Nona’s first car ride Nona was so quiet they had to keep checking on her to make sure she was OK.  This time that wasn’t a problem – she was howling and we knew she wasn’t OK.  Neither one us wanted to say it but we both knew this was Nona’s final ride.

We walked in to the clinic and were quickly ushered into a room.  The lab tech took a look at Nona and then called for the vet.  They took her away and hauled her to the back to give her some painkillers.  After taking our information we sat in that little room waiting for what we knew was coming.  The vet came in and gave us the explanation.  Arterial thrombosisembolism.  Essentially a blood clot had formed in her heart and broken free and blocked all the blood flow to the rear half of her body.  We could transfer her to a specialist but the success rate for treating the condition was “not good”. 

We made the decision we always knew would come.  I’m thankful it was an easy one.  It was not a question of the treatment being too expensive – we weren’t being put in the uncomfortable position of putting a dollar figure on our pet’s life.  It was simply time to end her pain and let her go.

They brought her back to us and we had a few minutes alone with her to say goodbye.  The vet came back and Shirley left the room to sit in the car.  I stayed and stroked Nona’s head and paw and finally uttered the words “Go ahead.”

The vet began pushing the blue liquid out of the syringe and into the IV.  Nona slowly closed her eyes and then her head drooped down onto her paws and she went to sleep.  It was the most peaceful thing to finally hear her cries of pain come to an end.  I gave her head one final stroke and then walked out the door as the vet carried Nona away one last time.

Twelve years and one day…thanks for the memories.

October 7, 1999 – November 19, 2011

I’ve driven the same truck for nearly ten years now.  We’ve been together since April of 2002 when she was barely a year old.  At the time she was in awesome shape with nary a scratch on her.  Still, it wasn’t love at first sight by any means.  The first time the salesman drove it around the corner I was stunned by just how *blue* it was.  I mean it was bright blue, every inch it seemed.  It was a stark contrast from the two-tone green/silver truck I was trading in.

But she was a rare find.  I had scoured the internet looking for this exact truck.  She had to be a diesel (my gasser couldn’t pull the trailer effectively any longer), she had to be a two wheel drive (I couldn’t afford a diesel AND a 4×4 – besides, it would be cheaper to maintain) and it had to be a standard.  She was the only one in the province.  And she was about to be mine.

Now, almost a decade later and she is starting to show signs of some rough use.  We’ve had some great times together and I’m not known for being the most gentle with the things I own.  This past weekend as I was in the car wash giving it its first cleaning since the Spring I was reflecting on how nice the new truck in front of me looked.  I started to wonder what it would be like to be starting brand new again, to start forming new memories with a new truck.

Well, knowing that I just don’t have the extra cash on hand to be doing such a thing I quickly put those thoughts out of my mind.  Instead I started to look at the ole girl with a different mindset.  Those marks?  They’re not flaws, they’re memories.  Each dent, each scratch, every nick and ding represents a memory.  You often here people talk about “character marks” with a dismissive tone, but this truck does have true character.  I started thinking about the stories behind each piece of damage and this posting started forming in my mind…

I think the very first damage I did to this truck was to the plastic part of the bumper on the passenger side.  It was barely a month after I bought the truck and we were backing into a campsite at Rochon Sands Provincial Park.  I hadn’t taken the time to get used to the length of the truck and I was concentrating so hard on my mirrors I didn’t notice a small post sticking out of the ground as the front end swing around.

**crunch** 

I remember how sick I felt at that sound.  I also remember thinking how I’d have to take it into a body shop and get that repaired right away.  After all, this was my new baby – I couldn’t live with it in that condition could I?  Well, I guess all these years later I know what the answer is.

Mark #2 is an odd one.  To this day I don’t know how it got there.  I’m not even sure where it happened, but I do recall the day I first spotted it.

It was the summer of 2003.  We were in Banff National Park and I had parked down a side street in the townsite while we wandered around checking out the shops and things.  We returned to the truck and as I came around the tailgate to the driver’s door I saw it – a massive paint scrape just on the rear corner of the cab. 

I had never seen it before.  I assume someone came along and hit it with the handlebars of his bike or something but I honestly don’t know.  What I do know is that there is no way I did it –- honest!  This one wasn’t my fault at all but it does bring back memories of a great road trip.’

The next “incident” didn’t happen until the summer of 2007.  This was the summer of the very first Ghost Town Convention.  We were on some backroad in southern Saskatchewan when our convoy came across fresh oil.  I was in the middle of the pack and the people in front of me didn’t slow down.  I followed suit and didn’t hesitate – there was a sickening sound of oily gravel being thrown up under the undercarriage.  The sticky mess coated the wheel wells and mudflaps.  I figured it would either wear off over time or I’d get some solvent and clean it up but I never did.  I’ve now come to the conclusion that the oil will be on this truck until the day it gets hauled to the scrapheap.  In retrospect I now consider that oily road in Saskatchewan to be *the* moment when my truck crossed into “beater” territory.’

The first real dent I put in the truck came in the summer of 2008 shortly after we moved to Priddis and onto the acreage.  The garage is just barely large enough to accommodate “The Beast” so I need to be very careful when backing in.  I need to be just inches from the workbench on the passenger side if I’m going to have enough room to open the driver’s door to exit without smacking the car.

When backing in I normally have two rules:  1)  Turn off the radio, and 2) Roll down the window.  My theory is that you’ll often be able to hear when you back into something long before you feel it.  Well, guess who violated his own rules and slowly scraped the passenger side of the box against the work bench?  Lesson learned.

The last time I did any damage to the truck was the summer of 2009.  We were on vacation in Oregon and I had dropped Shirley at the outlet mall in Lincoln City while I went to check out a nearby park and do some Geocaching.  I ended up locking the keys in the truck.  I had left one of the small windows open and I had to do some tricky manoeuvring with a hooked stick to finally reach the lock and flip it open.  This was done with the assistance of someone from Seattle who saw me struggling and decided to see if I needed help or if I was just an incompetent car thief. 

I was so intent on getting the door unlocked I failed to notice that my belt buckle was scraping the paint quite badly.  “It’ll buff out” I said yet, two years later, those scratches are still there and they server as a reminder why I have added another rule:  “Always visually verify you have the keys when leaving the vehicle.”

I don’t know how many years The Beast and I have left together.  Certainly I have no plans on replacing her but, as I know all too well, all it takes is being in the wrong place at the wrong time to put an end to that.  I’m hoping I’ll still have a good number of years left – I just hope I can stop creating such a character vehicle. 

Wow, it’s been a year-and-a-half since I last did a “soundtrack” posting.  I guess it’s been awhile since I had a song carry me back to a different time and place.  Today my iPod hit upon “Live Until I Die” by Clay Walker.  The song was originally released eighteen years ago (Whoa, how did that happen?!?!) in October of 1993, but for me it will always represent the Spring of 1994.

I had been working at the Alberta Wheat Pool in Enchant, AB.  The Spring rush was over and my services driving the fertilizer tender truck were no longer needed.  I’ll always remember that truck, because it was a brand-new 1994 GMC TopKick and I was the first one to get to drive it on a regular basis.  I also was the first person to scratch the side of it, but that’s a different story…

Anyway, I had been laid off and wasn’t sure what I was going to do.  This was just months after I had quit my job as a long-haul truck driver.  Let’s just say I didn’t exactly have my career path outlined, shall we?

You have to remember this was pre-Internet so job hunting meant scouring the classified ads in the newspaper and mailing resumes (yes, kids, we used paper and snail mail back then!) to any company who might be looking.  I was sitting at home one afternoon when the phone rang and I was asked to drive up to Brooks for an interview with a company called West-can Seal Coating.  Well, I didn’t actually know that at the time; what I did know was some company wanted to interview me and they wanted to interview me right now.  Who was I to refuse?

I don’t remember much about the interview.  I remember being told the company had just relocated to Alberta from Saskatchewan and needed to replace their oil distributor driver who had just quit.  I remember being asked about my driving skills and I remember NOT mentioning the scratch on that brand new TopKick.  I was hired on the spot and told I started the next day.

“Excellent.  What time do you want me here?”

“Not here.  Canmore."” 

I must have visibly been shaken.  “Canmore?”

“Canmore.  The Akai Motel.  Just go to the office there and tell them you need to check into Gerald’s room.  He has an extra bed.  Get up there tonight because you start early tomorrow.  You work ten days on and four days off.  We’ll pay you $12.86 an hour.  Any questions?”

That was it.  I’m still not sure how I got the job considering I didn’t know what an oil distributor was or even what chip sealing involved.  Heck, I had only had my Class 1 license for less than a year.  I was a small-town kid being sent on the road with a group of grizzled construction workers with no idea what was waiting for me.

That’s where Clay Walker comes in.  His album was loaded into the CD changer behind the seat of my truck and I remember it playing as I left the Calgary city limits, westbound on the TransCanada Highway heading towards the mountains.

And I don´t wanna think about tomorrow
I don´t need anything money can buy
I don´t have to beg, steal, or borrow
I just wanna live until I die

You know how vivid that memory is, even all these years later?  My CD had a scratch on it and the song was always skip briefly at the same point in the song – to this day when I hear the song I still expect to hear that skip and it takes me by surprise when it doesn’t.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I think that was the day I officially “grew up”.  I was away from home and living life on the road.  That job finally gave me the freedom to get my own apartment and move to the city.  That job taught me that I had the strength of character to not fall in with the crowd and spend the bulk of my paycheque in the hotel bar every night.  Nope, my character had already been firmly established and I wasn’t about to change now.

Skippin´ rocks, skippin´ rope
Laughin´ at all my best friends jokes
Things I loved when I was a kid
Muddy roads, muddy feet
I didn´t live on no blacktop street
Things have changed a lot but I never did

There is something about the prairies that always gives me the feeling of coming home again.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the mountains.  I love the feeling of making the final ascent onto a ridge and having a spectacular view unfold before me.  I love the feeling of accomplishment that comes from pushing your limits. 

But, the prairies are different.

The mountains are an obstacle – something to be conquered.  The prairies don’t ask to be conquered, they welcome you and comfort you like a blanket fresh from the dryer on a cold winter night.  They surround you with soft glowing waves of yellows and gold.  They gently wave in the breeze, back and forth like the rocking of a cradle. 

Mountains are a harsh mistress – always teasing you with glimpses of what great things are to come if only you can do “this one more thing”.  The prairies are a loving wife – there can be no secrets for everything is there to be seen.  Nothing hides on the prairies.

Mountains are work.  They represent the constant shifting of gears as you climb and descend the passes.  The prairies are relaxing.  They are an easy drive with an automatic transmission and cruise control.

The prairies are where I was born and lived the formative years of my life.  I can remember riding our bikes out beyond the town limits where the pavement would end and the gravel would begin.  Like characters from a W.O. Mitchell novel, we connected with the prairies in a way that transcended our environment.  Irrigation ditches made wonderful playgrounds, endless fields in various states of harvest surrounding us at every turn.

As we matured our games may have changed, but the prairies remained our constant companion.  Racing our cars up and down grid roads, performing “Dukes of Hazzard” fishtail turns, truly experiencing the endless sky and horizon only a prairie dweller really understands.

“There’s nothing to see.”  This is a common lament I hear from those who don’t understand the connection.  Perhaps that is the case to those interlopers who didn’t experience what I did.  “Nothing to see?  Why, on the prairies you can see EVERYTHING.” 

I will continue to chase the mountains, to push for higher and greater summits.  I have the security of knowing my prairies will be there upon my return.  For, no matter how much we push the city limits and try to gobble them up, the prairies will remain – as they have been and as they ever shall be.