We started the year with our usual trek up to The Farm near Peterborough, which had turned into a winter wonderland, so we scraped the pond and did some skating. We had the usual feast of gourmet creations, including an awesome turkey dinner with Zoe’s friend Jade and Kris and Marc’s niece Becca and Stephanie and our friends Barb and Lori, and my famous yin-yang caviar pie, which I stole from Marc and Kris. Back in Toronto, Meaghan premiered her cool new hairdo and Zoe performed in her school’s presentation of the play Legally Blonde, playing the sarcastic lesbian character 🙂
I got a cool email from my friend Rob Hyndman in which his dad Bob — who flew with my father in German — shared photos from a famous incident in which my dad tried to help steer a fighter jet and it wound up skidding off the runway and into a field (something about the front steering wheel control being different than he was used to). We went to Orangeville for one of Zoe’s hockey games and the hockey dads had an impromptu cookout in the parking lot, with condiments on a foldout ironing board.
Soon it was Winterlude time, with skating on the canal and poutine and beaver tails, and it turned into a bit of a whiteout at one point. Ottawa even has these cool new enclosures where you can put your skates on without freezing to death, which is nice. Unfortunately, 2015 saw some bad news as well — I and the rest of the writers at Gigaom were told in March that the company had essentially run out of money, and the funders didn’t want to put any more in, so it was closing immediately. It was a pretty big shcok — I had been talking to Om Malik, my friend and the founder, about a job offer from the Wall Street Journal and he never mentioned the possibility that Gigaom might shut down. After much deliberation, I decided to turn down the job with the Wall Street Journal (they wanted me to move to San Francisco) and accepted a job with Fortune magazine. Onward!
Putting all of that behind me, we put winter behind us as well and headed south, where we did a swamp tour of the Everglades, complete with alligators (which our guide called over and fed by hand) and some of the group got to put their feet in the sand near Miami Beach — I had to wait with the car so we didn’t get towed 🙂 We spent the night in a tiny apartment where we somehow crammed all seven of us into bunkbeds, and then it was off on a cruise with lots of pools and hot tubs and our own little balcony.
