A Year Without Blogging

I just posted a video and I realized it's been almost a full year since my last blog post.  I would say I'm disappointed in myself for not posting in the last year but I'm not.  The last year has been an interesting one.  In the last year I have lived and learned a lot.  So what have I been up to you may ask (assuming there are people out there I don't know that follow this blog).  First let me go back a bit and talk about what led up to last year.

A few years back I received some unfortunate news that a friend from high school who I cared a great deal about but have been out of touch with for many years was in a car wreck and is now paralyzed from the waist down.  Other than this being a terrible thing for her it made me realize life is short, sometimes too short, and fragile.  This made me think of some things I had wanted to do with my life that I felt I had missed out on, so I decided why not just do them. 

This realization sparked a 4-Hour Workweek style mini retirement break.  I came up with this idea in the Fall of 2006 and I did not even hear about this book until I was almost done with my trip, but none the less I did basically what Tim recommends.  I took an extended leave from work, traveled on the cheap, and enjoy life for a bit.  If you haven't checked out his book I recommend it if only just for the time saving recommendations he provides.

My original plan for the time off was simple but as things usually go my plans changed over time and what came to be was way beyond anything I could have come up with at first.  My original plan was to take the majority of the ski season off and live and work in the mountains in Colorado teaching snowboarding and snowkiting as much as possible.  I began saving up as much money as I could with the intention of taking a 4 month leave of absence from work.  As 2007 ws drawing to a close I realized my project at work was not going to wrap up as I had hoped in December and would run long into January.  This combined with  few other things was going to force me to delay the start of my trip until most likely February.  As any good Agile thinker I adapted my schedule and plans to fit what I had to work with.  Long story short here is the ultimate trip I came up with.

• 1 Week driving from Boston to Colorado with a stop off in Chicago
• 6 Weeks in Summit County, CO (Breckenridge / Keystone / Arapahoe Basin area)
• 2 Weeks at The Reef in St. Lucia
• Wind & Water Open, Corpus Christie, TX
• 6 Week Road Trip from South Padre Island, TX around the Gulf Coast, Florida, and up the East Coast back to Boston.

What originally started out to be a snowboard / snowkite trip turned into the ultimate kiteboarding adventure.  I realized I had the opportunity to attempt to kiteboard every state that touches ocean between Texas and Maine (18 states).  To my understanding this has never been done, and still has not done, I'm missing 4 states, but will finish the journey as soon as the water warms up.

On the road trip I drove my (new to me) 2000 Jeep Wrangler and camped the majority of the coastal road trip.  On the coastal part of the trip I made it to around 25 different beaches in 13 different states.  Some of the highlights included South Padre Island (camping on the beach), Couch Surfing in Galveston (before Ike), Gulfport, MS (Katrina really F-d that place up), Charleston, SC (Very cool city and great kite spot), Outer Banks (kiting of course but also the random Jam Session I walked in on and played for a few hours), Washington D.C. (landboarding the Washington Monument Park), Random downwinder in Myrtle Beach, 2 am breakfast in the Hilton Bayfront Parking Lot in St. Petersburg, FL (long story, man that french toast was good though), and of course every single day in St. Lucia at The Reef.  There are so many great memories, too many to list here.  I did blog about it here though if anyone is really that interested.

My trip ended in late June and I was back to work in early July.  I wish I could say work has been phenomenal since I got back but that is hardly the case.  All I'll say is I have a fundamental difference of opinion on what type of work I should be doing and what my company seems to focus on.  Which is fine, everyone has differences of opinions.  Recently I have been able to get back to .NET work and starting to implement Agile concepts throughout the business organization at my current client.  I am working with one of the client resources to develop a sort of Agile Methodology in the Sales / Service Industry.  I hope to have some exciting things to blog about if we can make this stick.  The client desperately needs some of the techniques we are going to implement.  The trick will be keeping my PM from knowing what is going on (very very very long story), he hasn't stepped foot on site in the 4 months I've been at the client so I may be able to make this happen.  I guess this is a variation on Robert Martin's Tell the customer nothing, and use agile methods internally approach.  It's just an unfortunate way to handle things.

Well to close this out I'm looking forward to this year.  There is a lot going on in my life (good, bad, exciting, etc.) and I believe this year is going to be a good one.  And I am going to commit to maintaining this blog more actively than I have done in the past.

Cheers,
Kyle