February. Andrea went skating on the canal with her family.
March. Andrea went curling and did a trip to Pakistan.
May. Time for a long weekend at the cottage with baby Paige.
June. It was a busy month with Brian and Marnie’s 40th wedding anniversary (not shown), Marney’s retirement, and Andrea and I bought a house.
July. We took a trip out to the Luskville Falls.
August. Another long weekend at the cottage (no, everyone isn’t really into basketball, it’s part of an annual Malcolm Olympics tradition).
September. The knitting group at CIDA made a baby blanket for Noel, and Andrea took a group of international experts around the Maritimes on a study tour.
October. Time for Thanksgiving at the cottage with baby Paige livening things up, while Andrea did a trip to Athens and Pakistan.
November. I had a chance to do some HR interviews in Newfoundland this month, with some playing on the side.
December. Big snowfalls in Ottawa, but everything pales vs. Christmas in Peterborough with my mom (Nan and Liz shown).
January. Andrea went to Bangladesh for work, with stops in Dubai before and Zurich afterwards.
February. Only a few photos for the month, with Andrea skating on the canal with her parents and sister.
April. April was a bit busier, with Andrea knitting me a bear and visiting Gatineau Park with Andrea’s family.
May. The month saw the standard “opening weekend” for the cottage.
June. We did the Ottawa Race Weekend (just the 5K), got to meet Baby Laura (Sebastien’s daughter), celebrated my birthday on our deck, and went to Wakefield by steam train.
July. We were a lot busier this month, now that summer had arrived. We did the standard cottage weekend, but we also did a two-week trip to Gaspé region, starting with Sageunay.
August. We continued being busy again, with GG’s 80th birthday, a wedding of two friends (Tim and Michelle), and a trip to New York for work, with some fun personal stuff on the side for Andrea and I, like visiting the Central Park Zoo.
September. Andrea turned 30 this month, and I put a photo album together for her with photos from friends and family. But she was away for her actual birthday, on a work trip to Pakistan, flying en route through England.
October. We went to Gatineau Park this month for the fall colours, and for fun, completed a digital scavenger hunt for a friend’s birthday.
November. We did a Remembrance Day potluck again, Andrea was back to knitting a hat, and we saw people kayaking in the Ottawa River near Island Park Drive.
December. Ah, the final month, and time for Andrea to take another trip to Pakistan. Oh, and we did some Christmas stuff too when she got back.
Another year wrapped up in the gallery. This was the first year with a digital camera, so the number of photos obviously increased exponentially. But, for some reason, with all the various movements of files over the years, the file folders were a disaster. I had about 4500 photos and video files for the year. But I knew when I started that at least half were duplicates. After I cleaned everything up, I got that down to 1385 photos (less than a third were unique, two-thirds were dupes!). I then curated that to a much smaller 486 active shots in total across 15 galleries. And from that pool, here are my 15 choices to recap the year’s energy and experiences.
February. We bought a new digital camera in February, one of our first “joint” purchases as a couple. It was a Canon PowerShot A80 and it served us well for a number of years. We started playing with it immediately, even finding reasons to go for a walk over to Parliament Hill to take some photos. Here is one of Andrea next to the flame on the Hill.
March. Earlier in the winter, Andrea and I had been talking about moving in together sometime “this” year, but with lots of work coming, and my finishing my degree, and lots of likely other events, we were wondering if it was the best timing. We weren’t in a rush, and we wanted it to go well, so we put it on the backburner while we talked about where in the city we might want to live, what kind of place, etc. Then Andrea’s landlords kicked her to the curb so they could have the whole house to themselves, and our plan to move in jumped forward. Me: So, what does this mean for us moving in together? Andrea: (pause) Well, I’m not moving twice! So we went on a hunt for a new house, just to rent for now. We found one over on Parkdale, just in time for Andrea’s neighbourhood to do a nosedive and her apartment was broken into! Nevertheless, here’s a photo of the new place before we moved in.
July. The month was busy with another wedding as well as outings for fireworks, football games, and picnics. The picnic is with Andrea’s family, along the Ottawa River near Lincoln Fields, while the wedding is for Alex and Jacob.
September. Since our day-to-day pressures of August had tired us out, we settled for only two events this month. We went for a hot air balloon ride, starting off at Carleton University, drifting over Uplands and the airport, and landing in a farmer’s field. We also attended Linda and James’ wedding in the Kitchener-Waterloo area.
November. If I had suggested that life was quiet again, this month proved us wrong. We had small things, sure, but we also had my graduation from Carleton with my Masters of Arts in Public Policy AND attended our fourth wedding of the year, this time for Catherine and Alexandre.
Since Andrea and I didn’t yet have a digital camera, the photos in my digital collection for 2003 are all ones that were scanned at some point, partly as I recall, to go on the new PolyWogg website I was designing at the time.
In March, Andrea took a work trip to Hong Kong. There was a park near her hotel, and she took some pictures of nearby buildings. One was identified in our notes as a church, but Google Image Search revealed that it is actually their former Supreme Court building.
It was my turn to take a trip in April. We had an upcoming international meeting to host in Canada, and we were leaning towards the East Coast. So we went and checked out the Keltic Lodge at the start of the Cabot Trail and then down to St. Andrew’s in New Brunswick. For today’s summary, I was deciding between photos of each, but obviously, St. Andrew’s is the more impressive building of the two.
Come June, it was time to hop on a plane together — we flew to Winnipeg to see the wedding of Andrea’s good friends Liam and Nicole. The quality of my photos is not awesome; I must have scanned them at low res as they were intended to only go on my website, not for printing. But it is what I have!
The next day, we went to the Winnipeg Zoo to see the red pandas, although they did NOT cooperate with our paparazzi vibe. Instead, we had to settle for polar bears, birds, kangaroos and tigers.
So that is a wrap for 2003, unless I scan more later.
