Moving On.

Fair warning, this is going to be a long posting, and perhaps a rambling one at that. But I enjoy writing, and it's going to be up for no more than a week - and while some may say it's just drama, hopefully one or two of you will enjoy.

I'm not sure whether a phrase like "moving on" should have an exclamation mark or a period after it - I guess I should check with Grammar Girl, who I first met almost five years ago on a trip to New York for a Boy's weekend - met figuratively that is. But regardless, I'm moving on! I've decided to shut down "Cooking with Kilby".

Early this year my life started to pretty much spin out of control; it'd been coming on for a while - my niece , as prescient as she is (I've always wanted to use that word), saw it first when I spoke to her from Miami at the beginning of March, during a weekend break with Kim - most of which was spent having to work on something for my boss who decided the night before I left that he wanted it Monday morning. I remember walking down Lincoln Road when she returned my call in the middle of the afternoon - entirely out of character for her - one of the shortest conversations we have ever had; and the food angle - Kim and I had just finished brunch at the Fontainbleau with some close friends where, of course, we'd had a couple of star sightings. . . Spike Lee and Giada De Laurentiis.

As I reflect on this now - as I've done many times over the past few months, I'm amazed at how many changes have coincided with this, not the least of which has been selling our house of 15 years, moving to a condo in a new neighbourhood. . . and getting rid of most of our furniture in the process, leaving the company where I'd worked for 12 years, and most recently starting a new job. It seems entirely natural that this should occur a couple of months before turning 50! Seriously, 50! (See how that whole exclamation mark, period thing works?!) And No, it has nothing to do with mid-life!

Of course, on a more shallow note, there have been a bunch of lesser, more superficial changes - although one of my friends said it's all part of the moving on. . . and although I don't agree, she's not the type to invite a debate: I've dropped 20 lbs (sorry Lucy, it's part of the story), I've flipped my wardrobe, I've finally gotten in to great shape for the first time in my life, and I've joined a fitness club and taken up running (fuckity ow!)

. . . oh, and I've started a book again.

So, where does this leave Cooking with Kilby?

I was cleaning up the kitchen last night having made some nacho's and, as usual, crud had fallen to the floor - which I promptly started to clean up. Kim suggested that I let Chinook look after it. . . and I said no. I went on to tell her that we'd had nacho's for dinner 10 years earlier, the night before I left on a business trip to England for a week and Kiska had eaten a piece of jalapeno - he was sick that night, and 10 days later he died. Of course I know the events weren't entirely related; but like so many other things, I remember the details explicitly. And Cooking with Kilby has too many such memories in it.

I started the blog after spending an interminable 3 hours with my company's entire marketing team stuck in a boardroom listening to Andy Lark, the latest Messiah, talk about blogs, and how they could create a community that could be leveraged for marketing purposes. And as painful as those 3 hours were they provided the inspiration for my blog - if I wrote about food, perhaps it would get my name out there in the food community - and perhaps it would lead to something.

A year later I wrote a blog entry on a house made pâté at Aubrey's (The Ugly, The Bad and The Good), and a few days later there was a comment on the entry from the editor of Ottawa Magazine in which she proposed that I write an article for her on the subject. I gratefully accepted and over the course of the next year this was followed by 4 or 5 other pieces in various issues, including the 2008 Interiors issue.

There's a lot of my life in my blog from the past 7 years, and too much of it involves work:

• there's the business trip to New York in the summer of 2005 when I was stranded with my two best friends and we discovered Mario Batalli's Lupa - honestly, a rain storm shut down the airport on a Friday night so we had to stay at the W Union Square! That was also the infamous "most extravagant sushi lunch trip" (see: Could Something So Good Really Be Poisonous) - and the "Chris's traveling boy toy trip" - another time for that one!
• there was the sushi meal I had at Heathrow while on a memorable boondoggle with a friend from Dallas (see: Worth Missing Your flight For? Maybe One Day. . . );
• there was a trip to Boulder, Colorado when we were trying to negotiate an agreement with GE, inspired by one of many very short-lived, but better VP's of Sales that we had - when I was re-acquainted with the Fuzzy Little Ewok (see: Reacquainted with the Ewok);
• there was the discovery of my directing debut with Female Catgirls in Heat - a movie that someone who worked for me at the time, and has since become one of my closest friends, bought me as a Christmas present (see: I have Arrived);
• the toast burning episode in the cafeteria, about which I friend at the time wrote in her blog (see; In case you didn't know);
• a disastrous meal when I took the whole marketing team out for lunch - misguidedly and arrogantly so, to Perspectives (see: Looking for a good quality restaurant in Kanata);
• and, perhaps most painfully but humourously, the year of the pregnancies (see: Does being pregnant alter tastebuds too.).
  

But there are also entries that will remain burned in my brain that had nothing to do with work:

• the two weeks that Kim and I travelled around the Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto corridor testing restaurants while our kitchen was being renovated in the winter of 2006 (see: And the Best of the Four);
• the ROI of Cooking
• most of the vacations Kim and I have taken over the last 6 years: Saint Saveur, the Kitchen tour, Victoria, Spain,, Arizona. . . and,
• the passing of my best friend ever - Haida!

But it's time to move on. As Kim knows all too well, I love to read my own writing. And yes, that probably reflects my vanity. . . of which I have much, as one of my friends reminded me at lunch yesterday. But I've stopped reading what I write. And of late, this blog seems to have taken on another purpose - I'm writing too many posts that I never publish, and I don't read it anymore. . . so it's time to move on. . . besides, when you end up writing an entry about sweating and can somehow tie it to food, as I did recently in Wallowing is way Better than Sweating, you have to conclude that you're grasping for inspiration.