So. This milestone.
I’d figured out a while ago that Day 1000 would end up in late September, but I wasn’t really planning anything for it. Mostly, I think, I just wanted to not miss a day. I’d made it this far, after all, it would look damn stupid to drop the ball right at the finish line.
(Not that this is a finish line.)
But I made it to my milestone: exactly 3,100 photos in 1,000 days (plus 2 as of day 1,001). Damn, am I going to have to remember to add those comma separators now that I’m in the 4-digit range? Small price to pay, I guess.
I feel I should do something special to celebrate. Not dinner, but push my creativity in different directions. I started blogging again on day 100; I should at least take that up more consistently, right? But what else? Some wits suggested vlogging, as though I weren’t too shy and awkward to go in front of a camera and say stuff.
Then again, didn’t I do exactly that today? My talk on WP-CLI was recorded; and as awkward and nervous as I felt inside, the audience was receptive and engaged, laughed at the places I wanted them to laugh, asked plenty of questions and sent me lots of LinkedIn invites afterwards. So hey, thumbs up? I’ll be honest, part of me is still not quite ready to believe it, but I can’t ignore the evidence.
And I need to remember all this going forward into the next thousand days.
What have I been up to, photo-wise, in the last five weeks? Nothing super out of the ordinary: mostly, a lot of walking on the seawall. The weather is still mostly good, so I’m counting my blessings there. I’ve seen herons, gulls and… is that a cormorant?, a different seagull, duckies, pirates, AND THE FUZZIEST CATERPILLAR IN THE WORLD OH EM GEE.
Some gorgeous mornings featuring towers, more towers, Jesus lights, Granville Bridge, the Granville Island Giants, boats, more boats, and parks. Some gorgeous evenings featuring Cambie Bridge, Granville Bridge (again), boats on English Bay, a little red boat, and a shot from near Science World.
As the days shorten, I expect to see a lot more sunsets and sunrises. Prepare accordingly.
There was something special early in the month, though: my brother and sis-in-law came to Vancouver for a week. Her first visit here, and only his second (after my Master’s graduation, waaaaay back in ’99). I couldn’t take the whole week off, but we took the ferry to Victoria on Sunday, going by Hatley Castle and Esquimalt Lagoon. Wednesday we went on a walking tour of Stanley Park, with stories of lurid murders and displaced Indigenous settlements, and then capped it off with a delish dinner at the Teahouse.
Friday, we went up Grouse Mountain. Not the Grind, that would be silly, even though there were people doing it on that cool drizzly day, but to check out:
- Capilano Suspension Bridge. No, I didn’t get on. Once (the last time my parents visited) was plenty for a lifetime. But we did go on the cliff walk thing, which was at least more stable and still gave us a great view.
- Cleveland Dam and the Capilano Reservoir, which I’d never seen before! I kind of wish the light was better, but you can’t tell me it’s not dramatic
- And then, up the mountain. We wanted to go to to this spot called The Eye of the Wind—which is a cool wind turbine you can visit, but sounds like the MacGuffin artefact in some cheesy fantasy novel—but you could only get to it in tours, and no more tours were going this late. Not that we could have seen anything, what with the fog and all. But we did get to see statues! And deer! And those two bears they keep! Who have really striking profiles and a lot of junk in the trunk.
As I said, I’m going to blog more. I’ve got more time now that I’m not preparing for WordCamp, and I have to make time for it anyway because it’s not just for fun, it’s a mindfulness exercise. And it’ll help me figure out how to take things to the next level, starting with what that even means.