A Man Reborn

I’m finally done my big project at work!  After over 5 weeks of ridiculous hours and stress I did the final render last night and put the project to bed.

I haven’t had much time to write because of the work project and because of Anthony and Ashley’s wedding last week.  But now I’m in the clear!  I left work in the morning to come home and catch up on some sleep and other things.  By the time I got home I decided to skip the nap – did some laundry, dropped some stuff off at the dump (more clutter gone!) and did some reading / played some games.  In general, I did nothing and I absolutely loved every second of it.

So now I’ve got some time and I’m doing some catch up writing here.  I’ll start with the wedding.  It was amazing!  The weather was looking a little sketchy with some torrential downpours the night and morning of the wedding, but that cleared up just in time for the ceremony and the pictures.  It was a nice, small wedding at Ashley’s grandparents beautiful cottage on Lake Joseph in Muskoka.  Very low key and perfect for the two of them.  My speech went good and I kept a hold of the rings – so no best man horror stories from me!

It was a cool experience to be Ant’s best man and I was honoured that he chose me.  I had no idea how much was involved so onto the internet I went to find out what I was in for.  Lucky for me, one of my favourite sites: artofmanliness.com had a pretty extensive section on it, covering all the duties, the bachelor party and the speech writing.  Go internet!

Having known the two of them for as long as I have and having them as two of my closest friends made the wedding extra special for me.  It was truly a great day and I’m glad I was able to be there and be involved.  The wedding was awesome, the pictures will be great, the food was delicious and the party afterwards was a ton of fun.  Good times!

Below are a few pics from the wedding weekend – some are mine and some were taken by Hasty.

As I mentioned before, I finally finished my big work project.  It took over 5 weeks of crazy hours and over that time I developed an entirely new skill set that will come in handy in the future, if not just for making my own videos better.  The theme of the video was the progression of technology at one of our clients over the past, present and future and I ended up putting together a 9 minute video that showed this through motion graphics and videos.  I threw in a few screen shots below and if I can get cleared, I’ll post the full video in the future.

Other things – I’m going to sleep like a baby tonight.  I haven’t had anything even close to resembling a full night’s sleep in over a week and the last couple of days I’ve had that weird body buzz that I know comes from being mentally and physically exhausted.  I was going to nap, but decided to skip it so I could get some good sleep tonight.

This weekend is Fan Expo – a big scifi/horror/comic/gaming convention that runs annually at the Metro Convention Centre.  Basically it’s geek-heaven.  I’ve gone for the last 3 years but this year I think I’m going to pass it up.  The lineup of guests this year isn’t that great and I wouldn’t be buying anything as I’m trying to de-clutter.  The only thing I’ll miss really is the people – I know quite a few people that will be running booths / tables and it’d be nice to see them, but I know I’ll run into them in the future at other events.  I just want to take it easy this weekend – maybe go for a nice long bike ride, get to the gym and take the dog to the lake or park.

Finally – my habit changes are still going strong.  I’ve yet to complain about something without coming up with a solution and the increase in positive thinking has really manifested in a few ways that I’ll write about later.  Despite the crazy work hours I’ve been doing my workouts too – even if it meant doing sets of push ups / squats / crunches in between renders at my desk.

I think I hear my bed calling.  Sleep. Now.