Lots of memes going around about this decade ending in X days, asking what you’ve done in that time. Ten years is a solid chunk of your life, and this decade saw me go from my 30s to my 40s in several million blinks of an eye. I stopped blogging daily somewhere in the middle of the decade, so large parts of my life have not been dutifully documented for prosperity’s sake – this will inevitably come back to bite me in the ass when I am super old(er) and someone says “hey, what did you do on August 15th in 2017?” and I don’t know because the only thing I have to go off of is an Instagram post of a picture of 10-year-old Kimli holding a pigeon. That is not helpful. Why did I stop blogging? This is terrible.

Existential panic over clinging to any shred of relevancy aside, the 2010s were an eventful decade. Timehop, the app that shows you your social media activity on today’s date in years past, has been filling in some of the gaps in my memory/website – for example, ten years ago Ed and I had just found out that the bedroom ceiling in our apartment was about to cave in, and we should probably start house hunting. 50 or so property viewings later, we did a whirlwind move into our very own condo in East Van (RIP Sparta) and started the decade as Home Owners and all the joys contained therein. 2010 saw the Vancouver Olympics, the Stanley Cup riots, that time I wore the same dress on CBC like three times in a row, and (most importantly) excellent friend Renee moving back into BC where she belongs. I got laid off in 2011, fled a horrible place in the night in 2012, and found a job that I dearly loved (only for it to go to absolute shit 18 months later). Ed’s company was bought and sold several times, and in 2013 he landed his current job that is responsible for almost every positive change in our lives since then. Work wise, I floundered about like a anal retentive fish. I left one job that was good but had no future for a company that had a 100% work from home setup, only to bite the literal dust two years later when that company was sold. I’m not at all thrilled with my current job, but I’m making more money than I ever have before in my life, so that’s something.

Ed and I have seemed to defy our own odds, and going into 2020 our relationship is the strongest it’s ever been – we might be weirdly co-dependent on one another, but it works for us. There were times in the early 2010s that we were entirely indifferent to one another, which is a really shitty place to be in and almost spelled disaster several times – but luckily, I matured a little and he loosened up a little and together we merge to form DEVASTATOR a small but cohesive family unit that is pretty dang happy nearly all the time.

The condo that we bought in East Van successfully housed us for more than 8 years, but with two people working from home full time we eventually outgrew our allotted space. Vancouver is no place to look for additional real estate unless you are a fancy millionaire, so we took our search outside city limits and found a sweet ass-townhouse in the bowels of South Surrey, just outside White Rock. We sold our condo at the height of the selling boom in Vancouver and turned the proceeds into a new mortgage on almost double the living space and one hell of a shopping spree at the Furniture Emporium. Good times.

I had two major health scares over the last decade, and because time insists on moving forward at an alarming rate, I can only imagine there will be more as we age like fine wine. I am stubbornly still alive (huge success!) though, and seem to be doing pretty well for myself.

So, what really changed for me over the last decade? Tons of small things like jobs and tattoos and vehicles. No change on the Big Ticket items – still blissfully Team No Babies, still pining the loss of the promised-but-never-delivered multi-dick extravaganza – but there was one other fundamental change in the glory that is Kimli:

I fell in love with NOT BEING HERE.

Prior to 2011, I hadn’t done much travel because I was poor and had other priorities. That year, excellent friend Shan requested a group trip to Cuba for a milestone birthday and we went and sat on a beach and I liked it well enough, even though there was no internet and I couldn’t get Diet Coke and we existed within the safe but boring confines of a resort. We came back and I went about my normal everyday existence until later that summer, when a friend asked the universe if anyone was available to catsit in October, in London.

I volunteered, because I’d never flown internationally to sit on a cat before, and roped Renee and Heather into coming along with me. We were gone for one week, which turned into 4 days in London and a very rushed 12 hours in Paris, and everything sort of got vaseline-lens soft and blurry after that.

I completely and utterly lost my heart in London, and later with travelling as a whole. Every spare cent I’ve made since that time has been poured into being elsewhere. Since that chance encounter with Andrea’s cat Cleo (RIP), I’ve been to London more times than I can count (7; I’m not good with numbers), back to France, to Japan and Belgium and Scotland and Ireland and Hong Kong and Spain and Morocco and New York (basically a different country), most of them more than once. It’s what I do. I travel. I’ve been ridiculously lucky over the past decade, and I try really hard not to take it for granted. I love travel and planning to travel more than most things, and even though it eats up most of my DINK money, I am STILL thrilled every time I have to take care retrieving my personal belongings from the overhead bin because items may have shifted during the flight.

We’re still 5+ weeks out from 2020, but I’ve already got trips to Amsterdam and Prague booked, and a handshook promise of a Japanese do-over next fall.

The travel’s been the biggest change in my life over the past decade. I still don’t anticipate having a normal hair colour when 2030 rolls around, but I’m pretty stoked to see what the next decade will bring.

let’s do this (again and again and again)