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Follow our journey

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Dave Sands and I are finally sharing our goal scheduled for next August. We are going to ‘Everest the Crunch’. What does that mean? Mount Everest is 8,849 meters high. The path we take when we walk up the Coquitlam Crunch, a local walk that traverses a power line up the Westwood Plateau area of Coquitlam, is 243 meters. To ‘Everest the Crunch’ we will go up the Coquitlam Crunch 37 times in 48 hours.

I’ve written a number of times about doing the Coquitlam Crunch with Dave… and there is going to be more shared as we get closer to our Everesting day. Dave will be starting this trek on his 60th birthday, I’ll be close to my 59th birthday. We have both been on health kicks which have put us in fantastic shape, and we’ve started training.

Today we did 3 trips up the crunch and 2 trips down, which took us 2 hours and 12 minutes. The training sessions will get longer in the coming months. When we Everest the Crunch, we’ll only be going up. We will be seeking support from family and friends to help drive us down so we don’t have to jockey our 2 cars up and down the hill between our upward climbs. We will also invite people to join us a lap or two.

All that and more details to come. For now it would be great to have people follow us on Instagram as we document our journeys, both from now until next August, and especially during our 2-day challenge. Please follow EverestTheCrunch on Instagram.

And the adventures begin…

2 week social media vacation

I’m removing Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram off of my phone until Sunday February 7th, 2021. That’s two weeks of shutting down the social media tools I engage with on some regular daily or weekly level. Staying on my phone will be WhatsApp and Snapchat because they both have family group chats that I engage with, without having other interactions beyond family.

I will continue to blog every day, and these blog posts will auto-post to Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook (to my Pair-Dimes page, not my personal wall, so please follow if FB is where you usually see my blog posts). Feel free to chat with me in my blog comments, but comments on other platforms won’t be seen by me.

There is no specific reason I’m doing this, other than curiosity. I want to see what I miss, and how I will use my time. I think I’ll end up with more audio book and podcast listening time, and I’m hoping that I’ll write and meditate more. Time will tell.

I actually deleted the Apps Sunday night, and I wrote everything above before going to bed. This morning I realized that one thing I’ll need to think about is how I get news? Normally I start my day in Twitter Search looking at the News tab and trending hashtags to get a sense of what’s happening in the world. This has been my strategy for a couple years because television and radio news are not designed to inform as much as to keep you watching and listening. And while I read some print news on my phone, it tends to be focussed on the coronavirus or US politics these days… and it seems to be more commentary and opinion than actual news.

In the end, I won’t have missed much if I’m tuned out of the news for two weeks. And although I’m not always in the room, my wife does watch evening news on tv. I will survive just fine with less news along with my social media vacation.

Interestingly, I came across some Coronavirus news this morning and did a little math with the stats. It seems that while the US has vaccinated 20.5 million people, Canada has only vaccinated 0.817 million. Looking at populations, my math tells me that the US has vaccinated 6% of their population while Canada has only vaccinated 2%. What’s the first thing I thought of doing with that info? Tweeting it… my social media vacation has already started to curtail my behaviour.

I’ll share my vacation experience and reflections on February 7th.

Documenting your life

It occurred to me last night that a daily blog is an interesting way to document your life. It’s not a true journal, like a diary, because there are things I won’t share because it’s public… However it is a document of my thoughts and it opens a door into the things I think about.

I’m basically at a point now where I look back at old posts and some I remember writing and some I don’t. The blog is documenting thoughts I don’t even remember having. Have you ever looked back at a piece of writing and not remembered writing it? It’s kind of a weird feeling.

Kids today are doing this in different ways. They are sharing videos on TikTok, photos on Instagram, and even memories on Snapchat. Yes, even on Snapchat, the app where everything disappears, there is an option to save your video and Snapchat will share your ‘memories’ with you each year, like us old folk see on Facebook.

We are documenting our lives in digital, social spaces. Some of these spaces will disappear over time, and we will lose a piece of our histories. I no longer have my Ning and my Wikispaces memories archived, I can’t even remember some of the names of the apps that I stored memories on, that no longer exist.

But some will survive, some will get archived. While a paper journal can disappear, digital footprints might stick around for a very long time.