Pic Spocket

 If you’ve known me for a while, you have seen me quite heavy and quite skinny. Between my sweet tooth and my low metabolism (efficient body), I am naturally overweight without taking any corrective measures.

More than a decade ago, I did a training and diet regimen that made me lose about 60 pounds, from 223 to 165 (I pretty much looked sick at that point).  Then I moved into a rural area, started a new job, stopped working out and gained everything back in the following years.

Then I did the weight loss thing again in 2002 with success. But since then my weight have followed a roller coaster. After a while, either a vacation time or a period with frequent business trips will trigger a slip and I let myself go for a while. In the period till 2007, I have been good at catching myself up before it was too late and bring it back down. But since, I completely lost it and recently reached my heaviest state to date, last December: 228 lbs. Here is a graph of my weight from 2002 to early January. Did somebody say “saw tooth”!

CLICK ON IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION

For the last year I’ve been saying to myself that I needed to do something but without acting on it. Last December I went to Mexico…
  

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Last weekend, we went for another walk at Ojibway Park with Newton. Our dog really LOVES the snow. He actually becomes a bit crazy when there is snow on the ground. He jumps in it, hides in it, digs in it, hide his toys in it, etc.

 So the of course Newton had a blast after the snowfall last weekend.

We encountered the usual suspects: Cardinals, Woodpeckers and Tufted Titmouse.

Hope you liked the pictures. The album has much more.

I have a bunch of stuff to post, but time is missing. In the meantime, here is something interesting on the net: some of the best news photographs from 2008.

You may want to skip the black ones with warnings for graphic content. Otherwise, there are several awesome inspiring pictures in the lot!

Here are the links

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

We’re back from out annual Christmas trip to Quebec City. That’s about a 12 hours drive from where we live. We brought Newton our dog with us. Turns out he travels really good! We did the 1st trip in 2 days, to give him a chance, but came back in one shot. We did not hear him for the whole trip. We just had to stop every 3 hours and let him run a bit.

Newton is still a handful sometimes, and I could not leave it too much alone at my parent’s home. The first time we did, it did not go too well. So we did not get to see all of our friends as we usually do.

We got away one night for our annual dinner with my friends that I know from the university. We see each other at least once every year since our graduation in ‘96. Steve and Isabelle were unfortunately unable to make it since they have a newborn (Congratulations!!!)

The dinner was awesome, and the party had a lot of energy afterwards for the 6 persons that we were. Thanks to Jean and Renette for the invitation!

With 2 photography enthusiast (with Martin), we did take a lot of pictures that night! We also played with my new wireless flash controller that allowed us to use the flash off-camera.

Here are a few pictures from that night!

Bigger versions and much more in the album linked below.