Surfer’s Paradise, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

Tomorrow we make our way to Brisbane after a little more than ten weeks in New Zealand and Australia. We saw some scenery, came up with some ideas and shipped three versions of Color Splash for iPad, so I’ll chalk it all up as a success. Where will Pocket Pixels appear next? Berlin? Thailand? Only time will tell.

This Saturday, I leave Vancouver, and I don’t know when I’ll be back. The Saturday after that, I get married on a jetty in Surfers Paradise to the most awesome chick in Aus. The Saturday after that, my new wife and I will be toting backpacks on a boat to an island in the Andaman Sea. I don’t know where we’ll be the Saturday after that.

It’s definitely a time of changes. In the past few weeks, I’ve handed in the final, revised draft of my PhD thesis, co-planned a wedding—a modest wedding, to be sure, but a wedding nonetheless—and I’ve moved out of my East Van apartment and onto a West End sofa. I only lived in the apartment for two and a half years, but it seemed longer. The thesis felt a lot longer than that.

Our plan is, post-wedding, to travel across Asia with no real fixed schedules other than what’s required by the imposition of the seasons and our own ability to deal with where we find ourselves. I’m not sure how long it’ll take, where we’ll go, or what we’ll find there. I don’t mean that in some romantic way, of peaking behind a curtain of the unknown. After all, we now live in an age where information is essentially free and instantaneous. And I’m not shy about using it. I’ve looked at blogs posted from well-trod paths, and Googled remote villages to check out the local guest house situation.

But while information is free (monetarily), experience still has to be earned, and it’s paid for in change (not the monetary kind). I have not the slightest hesitation about getting married, but I’m curious what will happen to the bachelor incarnation of Eric. Travel, I have a few more qualms about, but I’m excited, too. What will be the relationship the married Eric getting sick in a Mumbai toilet—for I will be getting sick—has to the Eric who currently sits in a Strathcona office debugging Objective C code into the evenings? Will the earlier Eric seem naive? Foolish? Pretty much the same, but with a bigger bank account? Google has no answers. I know. I checked.

O Canadas and High Fives, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

Robson & Howe about 20 minutes after Canada won the gold in men’s hockey. I’ve never seen such an outpouring of joyous patriotic fervor — you can’t hear it, but the crowd was singing O Canada. I’ll admit it, I was a little choked up and yes, I’ll say it, proud to be a part of it all and proud to be Canadian. Despite going out of my way to really not have much to do with the whole thing at all.

And on that highest of high notes, the olympics left Vancouver, like an annoying house guest that always wants to be doing something when you’re working, but then they leave and you sit alone in your apartment and you’re all “well… now what do I do?” The streets and skytrain were unnaturally quiet, the red and black Canada hoodies were gone, and nobody asked me directions or randomly high-fived me. The olympics came and went, and all I got was two sweet, sweet weeks of uninterrupted thesis work.

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