absent.canadian

It’s not quite here yet, but I can’t imagine much else happening in 2004, so we might as well get a head start on things. First off, Muskoka and Sydney wish you a wonderful 2005.

Thank you, 2004, for bringing us no end to the media pandamonium. From the election to the various nonhappenings in the lives of celebrities, it has given me more reason to turn off my television and pick up a good book. In fact, 2004 may hold the record for “year with the most books acquired and read”.

Thank you for keeping me in North Carolina for one more year. I don’t really have much of a love affair with this place, but it continues to be a learning experience.

Thank you for mother nature. Over 120,000 people dead and the dipsticks of the world have already politicized this tragedy. It’s not enough that innocent people die at the hand of something entirely out of our control - no, now we have to go and bicker about the government and the United Nations and who is giving what and how much money is donated per population and what so-and-so said about someone else, blah, blah, blah.

Speaking of the environment - I still have buyer’s remourse for not buying the fuel-miserly Honda Insight, and I feel terribly every time I fill up my tank. Thanks for the gas prices, 2004. It was worth paying $25 to fill up my tank (when I was paying just over $20 this time last year), just to be able to see the horrified looks on SUV owners’ faces as they fill up their luxobarges for the umpteenth time in a ridiculous short span of time. (In 2004 I read Keith Bradsher’s book “High and Mighty”, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is vehicle shopping at the moment)

Thank you, 2004, for giving me one more year of employment. Every paycheque I get reminds me of how much I have, and how little other people have. The seemingly infinite number of credit card offers and junk mail that arrives in my mailbox tells me that a lot of other people know how much I have, too.

And while we’re on the topic of junk mail, thanks for all the spam in 2004. I receive an average of a hundred to a hundred and fifty spam emails per day now. Multiply that by three hundred and sixty five, and we have … well … a lot of frigging spam. And just for the record, I don’t want to buy a university degree, viagara, cialis, or any other male enhancing drug. I’m not looking to refinance my mortgage (mainly because I don’t have a mortgage), and I don’t care in the least what the 25 year old down the road wants to do with me tonight, now that her husband is out of town. But thanks for all the offers, 2004.

Thanks for the trips I had too Canada in 2004. It’s refreshing to go back, and I always come back with my batteries “fully charged”.

Thanks for all of the photographs I have taken in 2004. It’s not the thickest year in my negative binder, but there were moments I’ll want to remember.

And most of all - thanks for my health. Seriously. I made it through 2004 with my body pretty much intact, and I’m trying to live each day without regrets.

See you on the flip side.

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