1999 was probably one of my worst years.  It included lots of friends moving away, a rather awful breakup, and 2 funerals, one of which was for a friend from college.  I was very happy to be done with that year.

New Year’s 2000 was celebrated with a few friends from Wesleyan hanging out in my apartment in Beacon for the weekend.  We play some video games, and went and saw Galaxy Quest on a lark after the new year.  That turned out to be one of my favorite movies.

My future game plan on Jan 1 2000 was pretty much 2 fold.  #1 go to the Sydney Olympics on IBM’s dime (I was on the olympics.com team already at that point).  #2 leave IBM as soon as I got back and join another tech company in either Boston or SF.  My friend Trey and I had some tentative plans to collectively move to one of those cities and be roommates.  The one thing I could have said with certainty in January 2000 was that I would not be at IBM 10 years later.  Man, predictions are hard. 🙂

The 2 events that most shaped my decade happened in 2001.  In January 2001, I made a decision to stay at IBM.  I had an offer on the table from another company that would have taken me to Cambridge, but staying at IBM meant moving to the Linux Technology Center, which I really wanted to do.  In June 2001 I met my future wife, Susan Tveekrem.  We met at my parents house in Vermont, and I can still remember sitting next to her on the ramp up to the deck chatting with her.  5 years later she would be escorted by her father down that ramp in a beautiful white dress.

The other 2 events that get honorable mention for the decade both happened in 2003.  In March 2003 the first MHVLUG meeting was held.  I consider creating and maintaining that group to be one of my major constructive accomplishments.  I learned a lot about people, group dynamics, and community building through that.  I also made an incredible number of friends through that group.  In September 2003, through some encouragement by Susan, I went back to school.  6 years later I’d graduate with a Masters Degree in Computer Science from Marist College.  Working on that degree defined a lot of the decade as homework and exams were often constraints on many aspects of our lives.

Susan and I celebrated the end of the naughts at our house last night, with about 10 friends, many made through or because of MHVLUG, playing games till about 2 in the morning.  Lots of great fun, and a good way to start off the Teens.

Just a quick post, as my body thinks it’s currently 2 AM. Susan and I are back from our India adventure, which should provide some solid material over the next couple of weeks as I manage to digest it all.

“We have so much… stuff.  None of us really need any more of it this year.  And yet all of the world there  are people that don’t have enough.  Wouldn’t it be better if we got someone a goat than giving each other more stuff?”    

      – my mother, 4 years ago

That was the beginning of changing our Dague family Christmas traditions.  We don’t do gifts to each other any more, but instead give something to some cause that each of us cares about.  It takes a major stress point out of the holidays, leaving only what is important behind: spending quality time with people you love.

This year my contributions are coming in two forms, and as time is running out on one, it seemed a good idea to post soon.

Yesterday, Susan and I went to the Poughkeepsie Farm Project’s annual plant sale. The Poughkeepsie Farm Project started in 1999, leasing a stretch of Vassar College land to create a Community Supported Agriculture program. There are a fixed number of shares to the CSA sold each year, which include a required number of volunteer hours on the farm, and then share holders show up once a week and pick up their bag of fresh vegetables off the farm. This lets the farmer share the risks and rewards of the farm, and allows the farm to run totally organically. If something hits the beans this year, and there aren’t many, that was the risk. If there is a bumper crop of tomatos, those are split equally between all the members. In addition to the CSA, the PFP helps run the farmer’s market in Poughkeepsie, runs programs for bringing Poughkeepsie Youth onto the farm for internships, and gives away 20% of the yield of the farm to local food banks. I first heard about the PFP through one of my classmates in my leadership class last year. She and her husband had been part of the CSA for a few years, and it seemed like a great idea to join up.

At the plant sale the CSA sells starter plants for you garden, each member is mailed a coupon that gets them 2 for free. Given that we had a bit of an aphid explosion on some of our tomatos and peppers, this provided a chance to back fill a few of the plants we lost. After we purchased our plants, we hopped in on a tour of the farm, which spans over 7 acres of fields. They have a 5 year crop rotation model on the farm, which helps replenish the soil, as well as confuse the insects. As soon as some bug figures out a good place to lay eggs for next year, their crop is changed out from under them, so they never establish. At one point we wandered through the asparagus beds, where we were encouraged to reach down and snap of a bit to taste. My god, I don’t think I’ve ever tasted asparagus that fresh, and that delicious, ever. Susan’s eyes lit up incredibly after that. While we’d both been generally into the idea of the CSA, the prospect of the kind of food that we’ll be flush with starting in 2 weeks, and running until November, washed over both of us, and we realized how great of an idea this was.

As we wandered around the farm, we also got the sense of being part of something larger there. The whole PFP mission, with bringing quality food back to the community, is very touching. It will provide a great many opportunities to volunteer beyond just working on the farm, which I’m looking forward to. In an era of styrofoam tasting vegetables delivered via your mega mart from who knows where, the idea that this summer we’re going to get a majority of our vegetables from 5 miles away, grown without chemicals, is very appealing. The promise of huge flats of organic strawberries in a month is something I just can’t wait for. 🙂

After three years, the idea that “we should really look at our spices, consolidate, and throw out old ones”, we finally began that project. What looked like an hours worth of work on Saturday, rapidly turned into a more extensive reorganization of the kitchen, which lasted most of the day. Following on the reorganization of our pots and pans a couple weeks ago, we now have a much more sensible placement of spices, baking materials, and our pantry. Perhaps I can even find what I’m looking for in our combined spice collection now. Hopefully this will also add inspiration to making more meals at home, as the kitchen is definitely getting more ergonomic.

Saturday also included “the great skating adventure”, whereby our two intrepid heroes thrust out into the world looking for a reasonable pond, or patch of ice to skate on. It’s been below freezing for a lot of weeks now which means frozen over bodies of water are all around. Even the Hudson is starting to chunk up here in Poughkeepsie. Our first attempt, the pond we took kayaking lessons on last year at the Stringham soccer fields, was crushed by very visible “Do not go on the Ice” signs. While the ice was probably solid enough, that little negative nudge was enough to make us pause. While we were sitting in the car, deciding our next move, I noticed heads bobbing back and forth over the far embankment. Hey… they’re skating, what piece of ice are they on? We pulled back onto Stringham, and found they were using the “Unsupervised Ice Skating Area. 2 Feet Deep”. “They” were 6 or 8 kids (middle school and high school), playing pick up hockey.

Putting on my new comfort hockey skates for the first time, and pushing out onto the ice, made me realize how much I was used to figure skates. For the first 30 minutes, I nearly fell every time I tried to accelerate. Non-existent toe picks made bad balance points. Susan’s first 30 minutes were all about humoring me; her skating skills were even rustier than mine. An hour later, with a game of tag under our belts, she was having a good time, and was able to move around pretty well on the ice.

I also spent a bunch of time optimizing my laptop development environment this weekend. Watching a few folks at work learn emacs for the first time, made me realize I’d never read the manual, and it was far past time to go through my 3 directories of elisp code, and consolidate it into something more sensible for me to manage. A few hours later, I was quite happy with the results, especially my modified two-mode-mode.

That led to the final weekend project, my Ruby on Rails address book, which now has a much nicer interface, and has phonenumbers added to the data model. I need to get a public demo site for that active soon. I’ve really fallen in love with Ruby, as it has made web development fun again.