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SOWERBY'S ROAD
Planning for a new year
Maintaining a dirty little secret has its hidden pleasures
By Garry Sowerby
Thursday, January 8, 2004
For me, the New Year renders feelings of excitement, reflection and renewal. With Christmas and its associated shopping, hustle and fun behind, I always find myself highly revved about turning the calendar year.
New Year's parties, levees and feasts are a treat. But taking time to consider resolutions, evaluate where life has taken me during the past year and contemplate what lies ahead is something I look forward to. One ritual I particularly enjoy is changing day planners.
I've used the same-style Brownline daily planner for all but three of the past 27 years, so I know the layout quite well. I get a crisp one every year and always wonder what it will contain when its tenure is up.
As usual, I turn the 'Memorandum from Previous Year' page into a 'Travel for Current Year' summary - a running list of my travels for the year along with the method of transportation used for each movement.
Last year there were 263 entries, all in North America, spread out between Tuktoyaktuk in the Northwest Territories, to Skagway, Alaska, Tucson, Arizona, Gustine, Texas and Dildo, Newfoundland. I drove 203 of the 262 transits between these destinations, logging about 150,000 kilometres behind the wheel.
The remaining 59 transits involved about 125,000 km on airplanes. I didn't set foot on a train, bus or boat other than a couple of cable ferries in Atlantic Canada. I did not roller blade, bicycle or ride an animal, other than a couple of trips in a 405 horsepower Corvette Z06.
Another profound statistic easily pulled from my low-tech day planner is 'travel days' verses 'home days.' In 2003, it was 195 days on the road versus 170 days at home - 52 per cent of my year was spent on the go. On each monthly summary page I keep a daily breakdown of workouts and power-walks, along with a number grading the level of noise in my head from the tinnitus that is my constant companion.
I use the back of my day planner to keep a list of contact numbers, reward travel codes and e-mail addresses. It takes a few hours to transfer this information to the new planner, which provides a good review of contacts along with options to re-organize and purge.
My wife, Lisa, bought me a 2004 day planner that appeared on my desk a few days before the New Year, another black Brownline. I dutifully transferred telephone numbers and compiled vital statistics from my 2003 planner. I counted trips and added up power-walk times, calculating that I had spent 5.71 days of last year walking around swinging my arms like a flailing idiot.
Then it was time for my favourite part - recording the odometer readings of my diverse collection of cars and trucks. I grabbed the 'key box' and then drove downtown to the 10-car storage bunker I rent under a high-rise apartment complex. Inside, my garage-within-a-garage is accessible through a lockable sliding wall, à la James Bond.
Behind that wall is my dirty little secret - a collection of vehicles acquired over the past 25 years. I keep them detailed and in prime running condition for reasons that, at times, escape me.
Once inside, I slid the wall-door closed. I turned off my cell phone and recorded the fleet's odometer readings. I checked 11 dipsticks, adjusted tire pressures on 44 tires and then reviewed each vehicle's to-do list. I noted my seldom-driven 1995 BMW 540i 6-speed still has a slight sweat around the rear differential seals. The slow leak on the right rear tire of the '65 F-100 pickup truck is still going about its business. The 1991 GMC Jimmy, used on a half-dozen adventures in the early 1990s, still has an electrical gremlin in the winch that drains the battery if I leave it connected. And another year has gone by without a wheel turning on the 1982 Checker Cab I bought from the Checker Motor Company in Kalamazoo, Michigan when they stopped production in the fall of 1982.
I spent a couple of hours down there fiddling with the fleet. I made entries in the new day planner sitting in an Adirondack chair my father made for Lisa and me. It was a true slice of vehicular heaven down in the 'bunker' with those rigs I can't part with.
I turned my cell phone on when I surfaced so my family would know I was back in the real world. On the way home I settled on a few goals for 2004. I'm going to get off this continent and snoop around some of the places I've always wanted to go. I'm getting our Checker Cab on the road for the first time in 10 years. I'm going to make a point of tracking down old friends.
When I got home I put my 2003 day planner on the shelf beside my desk. It fit right in with the other 26 day planners I've managed to hang on to since 1978.
It's a good thing, since somewhere down the road I might need to know how many minutes I power-walked down the main street of Inuvik on that bitterly cold February morning back in 2003.
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