My 2011 hasn’t been particularly spectacular. I’m still employed and my health is OK, so I guess I shouldn’t complain. I can’t think of anything that happened in 2011 that was a great thing or made me really happy. Maybe this short trip down memory lane will remind of something that made me smile.
January
I wrote one of my most-viewed blog posts ever. It was about the new enforcement of the Illinois Use Tax. Freaky to think people thought to visit my blog, thinking some guy named “geognerd” would have good information about filing tax returns. I look forward to getting all my documentation together to file my taxes for 2011. Seriously, I enjoy going through my finances. I might do it this weekend.
I also made a big work-related mistake. I accepted a side job writing quizzes for an urban geography textbook. I had never written test questions before, and there were all kinds of rules and requirements governing the type of questions I could write. It was real tedious. I had to read the whole textbook and write the questions in only a few weeks. On top of that, I blew the first deadline. I missed an e-mail telling me where to get the book and quiz materials, so I was thoroughly confused when the client asked how I was doing because I thought I hadn’t received any materials yet. I ended up having to do three chapters’ worth of quizzes in a week. I almost subcontracted the work to someone to get it done in time. I learned my lesson. Find out exactly what is expected of me and get examples of the work I will be doing, before agreeing to a contract. The money was decent, though.
February
I went to the Chicago Auto Show again. Took lots of photos, but didn’t win a free gas card like I did the year before. Some of the photos were pretty good, and I spent more time sitting in and checking out the cars.
There was the big blizzard, the one where people got stranded on Lake Shore Drive. My drive home was long, but not much worse than a usual drive in the snow. I got home just before the big snow hit. I remember looking outside that night and seeing a snowdrift against a neighbor’s garage that was taller than the garage. Their front door was also blocked by a drift.
I bought a hard drive to make another portable hard drive for backup purposes. That was good timing. In September or October, there was some really bad flooding in Thailand, which shut down production of hard drives. Drive prices more than doubled.
My job has deviated away from GIS during the past few years. It’s disappointing and kind of depressing. I really enjoy geography and doing research, but I don’t have time to do it anymore. When I come home, I’m worn out and don’t want to work. Geographic research on my own time has become rare. The only time I can do any geographic research is on my own time, so I am not very prolific anymore. I did manage to put out an interesting look at the location of Illinois vehicle emissions testing facilities.
Another one of my passions is photography. I did a geeky comparison of cameras – a BlackBerry, an iPod, and a compact digital camera. Check out the pics on Flickr. The Droid Pro I got from work later in the year has a pretty decent camera, but I still don’t think a cellphone camera can replace a real camera.
March
I temporarily ruined the PocketPC I use for wardriving. The Bluetooth stopped working on it. But sometime in the fall it started working again. Yay.
I got pissed off about an article that basically said a lot of the tech products I use are junk. I rebutted the article thoroughly here. Just because something is old tech doesn’t mean it stinks. I don’t pay any monthly fees on my VCR. Can TiVo boast the same?
April
My birthday is in April. I don’t think I’ve ever acknowledged that here. As usual, it was nothing special. I always say that I don’t want anything special for my birthday, but honestly, I’d love it if somebody made me a really fancy cake. More about that in a later post, if I remember to write it.
I got to finally ride on the Stearns Road area bike trails and the Fox River Trail in South Elgin. I have gone down there for a couple of rides since then.
There was one technology upgrade made. I bought a new monitor, a 21.5″ Asus LCD flat panel monitor. I was getting fed up with the 17″ NEC CRT monitor I had been using for several years. It just too small to run the resolution I needed to run for work and play. Flight Simulator X looks better, and it’s easier for me to do work with spreadsheets and ArcGIS. This is one of my better tech purchases. The monitor is working great. Its capabilities match my computer. I built a powerful state-of-the-art computer in 2010, but I had it lashed to a monitor that was hot stuff 10 years ago. I won’t be upgrading my monitor anytime soon. I’m not sure what else I could possibly want from a monitor.
May
I went off on some hipster taco place near where I work. I’ve never eaten there, but I have no problem ripping on it. I think it’s stupid that people spend $30 on tacos and wait hours to get them. The restaurant was covered again on TV later in the year. I still see people waiting in line for the place to open, even in the dead of winter.
There was my trip to the Indianapolis 500. It was my fourth consecutive 500. I had a good time and took a lot of good photos. I think my photos of the people were better than my photos of the cars. Dan Wheldon won. None of us knew it would be his last victory.
June
I bought a bunch of flashlights. I ended up giving one away. I still have that box full of flashlights. Someone gave me another flashlight as a Christmas gift. I have so many that I will never be in the dark.
June is when I usually take time off from work. I hoard my vacation time, then blow it all just before it expires. I used to take the final couple weeks of June off. But now we’re understaffed and all I can do now is take long weekends. I also have to coordinate my schedule with someone else. It sucks not being able to take a whole week off. Anyway, I bought a Groupon for the Volo Auto Museum. I wanted to do something fun that was basically a day trip, something that would fit with my measly time off from work. This trip to the museum worked out well. I spent most of a day there. There were some interesting cars, but it’ll be a while before I go back again.
I had a health problem toward the end of June. There was a possibility I would lose my job. I work in government, and Illinois’ budget is a mess. Funding was uncertain for my office. Because of all this stress, I had abdominal pains. My doctor thought I ate something bad. The pains went away but came back in July. I went to the doctor again. This time he concluded I had bowel spasms. I knew that was my problem all along. I’ve had bowel spasms before. I was given medication, and it actually worked. I didn’t know there was medication for that. It really sucks when stress results in a health problem.
July
Went on a long bike ride, 28 miles through McHenry County. Got to see a new park in a reclaimed quarry.
I went to two car shows in July. The first was the Country Car Show in Elburn. It’s one of my favorite car shows in the Chicago area. They charged $5 admission this year, but the show is well worth it. As usual, I saw some cool cars, took some great photos, and learned some stuff. Here’s my blog entry about the show.
The other car show I went to was the Sycamore car show. It was so damned hot that day. There were so many cars. My Camelbak ran out of water toward the end of my stay. The cars were alright. With a show that big, you’re sure to see something good. But now I know, I should only stop to check out the absolute coolest cars, otherwise it’ll take me forever to get through the whole show. Here are the pics from the show, and here is the blog entry I wrote. I plan on going back to the show in 2012.
I read a book for fun for the first time in a really long time. I read Jaycee Dugard’s A Stolen Life. It wasn’t exactly a fun type of book, but it was very interesting and written in a way that made it easy to read. I think this was around the time her interview was on TV. She seemed so normal despite her captivity, so I decided to read her account of what happened.
I had the battery in my car replaced after it started acting weird and throwing up error messages. Only a few months later, Optima came out with a replacement 12V battery for the Prius. It’s probably better than the Toyota battery I ended up buying. I don’t know why it took so many years for another company to make a replacement battery.
August
The Geneva Concours d’Elegance is in August. I have gone to it since 2007, I believe. As usual, I took hundreds of photos. The show maintained its tradition of having unique, rare, expensive, antique, and exotic cars. Got to see a guy creating a painting of one of the cars.
It was a crazy time at work. Super busy. This unusual busyness would continue through November. Normally things would only be crazy during August and early September. It’s not fun when you have no idea why you are so busy and have no relief in sight.
September
I started eating Italian Beef more often. I have been a fan of them for a few years, but I would rarely get one for lunch. Then a new beef place opened a few minutes away from work. A co-worker gave it a thumbs-up, so I checked it out. I got hooked. I’ve been going there every one to two weeks for lunch, even though it is a bit pricey. I like to get a cheezy beef with sweet peppers.
I caught a cold in September. For the first time at my job, I had to go home. I’ve been working there for almost eight years. I felt so awful. So much mucus, coughing, a bit of a sore throat. It took two weeks for me to get over that cold. I had never hacked up and blown out so much mucus in my life.
Despite being so sick I had to stay in bed, I managed to go to the Downtown Elgin car show. The snot stopped running long enough that I was able to wander the show without blowing my nose or hacking up a lung. It was nice to get outside, and I really didn’t want to miss the car show after going to it so many years in a row. The attendance was pretty low, so I don’t know if the show will be back next year. I took a few dozen photos.
No blog posts were written in September, because I was sick, busy, or overstressed.
October
I went geocaching for the first time in a while. Somebody placed a ton of geocaches near my house, so I felt obligated to go find some. It was fun. It felt so great to stand in the middle of a field, taking in nature, watching the airplanes, taking photographs, and finding a geocache. It was like all the things I like were in one place and I was experiencing all of them at once. It happened at the spot in the photo to the left. I felt alive and happy. Such a contrast to being sick and so stressed during the previous month.
About a week later, I went for a bike ride on one of my favorite trails in the Chicago area – the Gilman Trail through Aurora. It is a wonderful ride in the fall, when the trees are so colorful. Here are some photos I took from that ride.
A co-worker told me about a disc golf course that opened near our office. I took up disc golf in 2010, so I was really excited about the prospect
of lunchtime disc golf. I ended up playing almost every day.
Then at the end of the month, I overdid it. I played 72 holes of disc golf over two days, 54 of which were on one day. I sprained something in my back. I had some pretty awful pain. It was hard to stand up, sit down, and bend over. It took a couple of weeks for the pain to get better. I would slightly re-injure myself a couple of times. Picking up a case of bottled water set me back a couple of weeks. Here I am in January 2012, two months later and still having some minor pain. I’m almost back to normal, but I do get back pain if I sit too long.
Dan Wheldon died in what is one of the worst auto racing crashes I have seen in my 28 years of watching auto racing. So much fire, cars going airborne, and bits of race car all over the track. His death hit the racing community hard. It’s kind of hard to think about the hours after the crash, when the race was halted and we were all waiting for updates on the injured drivers. I hope I never have to experience a race like that again. I wrote a post sharing my memories of Dan Wheldon.
I found a purpose for my old computer, after it sat unused for over a year. It is now used in my living room for streaming videos and TV shows from the internet. That computer is almost eight years old and still chugs along.
Between March and October, I lost 20 pounds. People actually noticed it and said I looked thinner. My pants were looser around my waist and would fall down a bit. It’ll be a challenge to keep the weight off during the winter. I can’t go for my walks, play disc golf, or ride my bike in the winter.
November
I did some geocaching again, this time in the vicinity of Lords Park. After barely doing any geocaching the last couple of years, there are finally some unfound caches nearby. I was such a prolific geocacher that I cleaned out the area. I spent some time watching the bison at the Lords Park Zoo. I felt sorry for it. I don’t know if bison are meant to be solitary animals or not, but I felt like I should keep it company. I took some photos.
I went on a bike ride from Wood Dale to Westchester on the Salt Creek Trail. It was a long bike ride, at 31.41 miles. It was my longest bike ride of 2011, and my longest since August 2010. I failed to account for the shorter daylight hours and had to hustle back to my car before it got towed or locked in a forest preserve. I foolishly rode too far. I rode back to my car at an average speed of 15mph, unheard of for me. I succeeded in getting to my car right at sunset. Along the way, I found out the park closed an hour after sunset. Still, I was cutting it really close. I was lucky I had enough energy to ride 50% faster than my usual pace.
Another stupid article was written about gadgets that wouldn’t be around in 2020, so I had to offer my opinion. Some of my friends say I dislike modern popular gadgets just for the sake of being different. I suppose they are somewhat correct. But newer isn’t always better.
December
I got a new cellphone at work, a Droid Pro. It was my first experience with Android in about three years, and I discovered that it compares quite well with iOS. I don’t wish I had an iPhone instead.
I also received a hand-me-down iPad at work. I wrote a hit piece about it. After sitting in my desk drawer for three weeks, I brought the iPad home with me for the New Year’s Day weekend. I used it for a few minutes this morning and was quickly frustrated by the iPad’s weight and its pixelated screen.
Conclusion
So there were some nice things that happened this year. I liked standing in that forest preserve in October. I got to ride on one of my favorite bike paths in the fall. I went to plenty of car shows. Going through my photos reminded me of how good of a photographer I can be.
For the new year, I hope to have fewer health concerns. I would also like to get a pay raise this year, since I have increased responsibility and a greater workload. I definitely don’t want to have my job threatened by politicians again this summer. I bought a new handheld GPS receiver, so I may do more geocaching than I have the last few years. What I want most is a happy year. Unlike 2011, I want to be able to look back at 2012 and say it was a good year.
