Happy birthday to my birthday girl. My best friend and partner in crime. Couldn’t ask for more in life than her.

I’m having so much trouble starting out with my first post of 2007. I didn’t do much to wish the world farewell, so I won’t try to do that now. There’s just been so much that has happened in the past year that it’s hard to sum everything up in one blow. So many good things to be thankful for, and the not so good things that make all the positives stand out that much more.

This February, I will have been married for the first year to Rebecca. You have no idea as to the hoops, ladders, and hurdles that we have faced to get this far, and the path ahead, short and long term, are far from easy. Nothing in life ever is, no matter who or where you are. But it’s when you take time to go for a walk in the park, like we did yesterday, that makes everything seem as easy as happily ever after. Reminds me that we have to wash our pants from yesterday to get all that mud out of our clothes as well.

I have a strong disliking for resolutions. More so, it’s a personal thing, but I understand that a new year brings that urge to many folks. A time for change and promises in the hopes of bettering your lives for the future.

For me, this is possible anytime of the year. If there is something that you want to do, you just start doing it. 2006 has been the year that has prevented me from doing so many things that I want to achieve in life. The fault lies hugely on the Canadian government, but this is the path that we’ve chosen to take. The waiting is killing me.

2007 will be the year that this is going to change. This isn’t because I’m going to try harder or finally get off my ass to do something with my life. I’m primed and ready to the opportunity, have been since I landed at YVR in 2005. The powers that be just have to give me that green light. Then finally, I can get back to making those plans to rule the world. Well, the world might be pushing it, but it’d just be nice to have the ability to visit my family back in the states again. It’s been over a year since I last saw some of them, far longer for others.

So there you go. The first post of 2007. A relapse to what this blog used to be. More on the personal side, and perhaps I should try to do more of this in the future. As this whole waiting process has gone along, we’ll have to wait and see. I’m just ready to break out.

I’m a few days late with marking the occasion, but it has been, officially, one year since I have moved to Vancouver. So much of my life has changed within the past year. Wrapping my head around it just gets too confusing, not to mention all the other projects that I have going on in my life right now. That’s not too bad for a guy who can’t legally work in Canada yet, but my time is coming.

Rebecca is so much a piece of everything that I call my life now. We figured out a long time ago that distances were too tough to keep us from each other, and the fight to get this far has been something we have done hand in hand. Our little home in the west end is more happiness than I could have ever imagined. That’s not to say that life has been a walk in the park. I just have an incredible partner in crime to push through it all.

I also haven’t left British Columbia, or even this country, since I came here. Moving so far away from your family is never the easiest thing to do. You leave behind everything that you have known to learn everything all over again.

I still have a slight problem with deciding which way is north. That might sound silly, but I grew up in a flatter evironment and about seven degrees further south on the latitude. There is even less sunlight up here in the winter, and the snow is only seen if you head to the interior.

Even after a year, there is still a lot of changes to get used to, but that’s what life is. I always had this thought in my head that my path would lead out of Iowa one day. I also understood damn well that such a venture would not be easy. Little did I know that it would lead me to Rebecca, moving to another country, and taking on the biggest change in my life.

The strange thing is that so much of my mindset has changed from just thinking I can do this to nothing can stop me now. Naturally, nothing in life is perfect or comes easily, but you make the best of what you have of it. Bumps in the road happen. You adjust and keep going. Rebecca and I do that everyday. It’s all about having fun, and we get to do that in the greatest city in the world.

That always seemed strange to say. Wishing someone a “Happy Halloween” or “Happy Holidays” seems more logical than wishing good tides of American independence, but that’s what you do.

This is my first Independence Day in Canada, but not my first out of the country. That honor goes to my time spent in Japan, but even that day was spent on an American naval air base. Never did I feel like I was celebrating a true American holiday than that summer. The U.S. military is excellent at those types of events.

Life has gone back to normal after the Canada Day long weekend. I will miss the parade and times with my family, but the weekend I had with Rebecca was a pretty awesome one. Lots of beach and lots of discovering more about Vancouver. We also consumed our share of alcohol, so that detail was well covered, even if it wasn’t margaritas.

There’s part of me that has this memory of my brother eating cereal with orange juice in it when I was a kid. At least that is something that I recall happening, but it could be one of those things that you make up and it becomes a memory. I also recall seeing this in a movie at one point in my life, so maybe I took that scene and commited it into my own memory.

I can’t recall the name, but there’s a kid who constantly gets crapped on and ends up having things turn out positive for him in the end. I realize I just described the plot of hundreds movies out there, but this one in particular has a scene where there’s no more milk in the house for his bowl of cereal, only to have his mother tell him to use orange juice instead, just after some other sibling or something mocked him for using up all the milk.

The other day, the situation was similar in the apartment. In all actuality, we go for the soy milk here, being that neither of us can handle straight milk too well. Cereal is all we really use it for. Ice cream and gelato is no problem, thankfully.

So I tried it. I was really craving cereal for breakfast, and this thought about using OJ instead seemed worth a shot. I did eat all of it, but it was a little too much on the sweet and sour side, not to mention the whole, being very… watery part.

Bottom line, it pretty much sucked. I won’t suggest it, and my years of not being interested in trying it until the other day makes complete sense.

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I hate the Yankees, too.

I was pulling for you, Korea. There’s still some honking and hollaring going on in the west end, but the previous matches had more to the parties, even at eight in the morning on a weekday.

Over the past few days, I’ve been calling a lot of folks that I haven’t talked to in quite some time. This whole, free calls to the U.S. and Canada through Skype has allowed me to throw away a fair amount of time to catching up with friends and family south of the border. I have a lot more people that I need to catch up with, but I do have other various projects going on that I need to keep working on.

I’ve also had a few people say that I don’t blog the way that I use to. The entries are shorter or that they’ve changed. I posted that was going to change after the last overhaul to the site itself. How I write here allows me to not only do something a tad more personal, but also explore other ways to expand on topics that I find noteworthy. Plus, this is my site. Not yours. I can do what I want.

I was sick a fair portion of last week. I had some sort of chest cold that got into my lungs and took away my voice. That translated into a dry cough which eventually loosened up a bunch of crap in my throat. I still have an ever so slight cough, but I’m getting back on track with things. I did go running last Sunday, thinking I felt good enough to do that. Of course, I ran the whole Seawall and over did it. The area around my left achilles has been sore, but I’ve been busy with errands over the last few days and haven’t experienced any problems with inclines as I was.

We have a lot of interesting things going on, and I’m getting myself settled into the B.C. lifestyle more and more. I’ll post more in the next few days with some of the cool things that’s happened this week. With the weather being as outstanding as it has been these past few days and my health coming back around, it’s tough to get myself to focus on doing “work”.