Treatment number five is done and gone and things are still going well. They kept the Vincristine at 75% again and Kim's fingers are mostly back to normal now so that is awesome.

My employer ordered me up a developer laptop so that I can work from home and it finally arrived last week! Originally I requested it because I did not know how hard the treatment would be on Kim and thus how much I would need to stay home. It's great that I don't absolutely need to stay home because that means Kim's doing well. However it's nice to have the laptop now so that I have the ability to work from home when I feel like it. Kim's looking forward to having me around sometimes just to help stave off the loneliness.

At the beginning of 2010 I posted a set of goals for the year. Now that the year is over, I should probably review those.

I'd say the biggest accomplishment of last year was finding, buying and moving into our new home. As I mentioned in the original post, the process of buying a home would quite possibly conflict with many of the other goals. The house plus Kim's cancer diagnosis did kind of put a hold on most things in November and December, but overall I'm really happy with how last year went.

Anyway, last year I managed to blog 65 times while my goal was to blog once a week. I didn't quite manage to accomplish that frequency, but I did far surpass the implied quantity so that is pretty good.

As for climbing I did get out a bunch and I did do five times a month for more than half the months of last year. However I did not get out as much as I would like. I managed to place second in my division at a bouldering competition at John's new climbing gym. I was really happy with that and am looking forward to competing in another comp at the same gym next weekend.

I had a lot of fun taking photos last year and am happy with the results. I haven't really even picked up my camera since last October though so I really need to get back on that.

I did a lot of new cooking last year and as a result I feel much more confident in the kitchen now. This is another area of my life that I have neglected recently though and I mainly blame the new house for that problem. I tend to get home later at night now so I don't do as much cooking during the week. I think I need to shift to cooking more on the weekends so that there are delicious leftovers for week nights.

I started a personal programming project last year, a web-based recipe storage app as I suggested in my original goal list. I did not finish it, but I had fun playing with databases, AJAX and the Prototype library. I also did a lot of good stuff at work so I'm not too worried about missing this goal. The point was to do some new software dev stuff and I certainly did that.

Although moving to a new house has had a negative effect on some of my goals, it has definitely improved my reading. I've finished almost two dozen books since moving in December and I'm so happy to have done so. Yay for the TTC!

My travel last year didn't involve any fun Canadian trips, but I did go to China which was awesome! Our travel plans this year are obviously going to be affected by Kim's recovery, but I think we'll ease back into the travel stuff with some smaller trips within Canada so I'll get to do the Canada thing eventually after all.

The other big deal from last year was Kim's diagnosis and original hospitalization and treatments. I can honestly say I wasn't prepared for anything like that, but I guess it was one of those "life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans" events. It definitely provided me with new perspective on life and my own long term plans for it.

Anyway, that's my review of my 2010 with respect to my goals. I plan on posting again soon with new goals for 2011.

Kim had her fourth round of chemotherapy Friday and it went as well as usual. The only new thing to report is that they've reduced her dosage of one of the chemotherapy drugs (Oncovin also known as Vincristine). A common side-effect of this drug is numbness and tingling in the fingers and Kim's had that since she started treatment. The concern is that this side-effect can sometimes become permanent. They didn't want to reduce the dosage initially due to concerns about the efficacy of the treatment. Now that they are comfortable the treatment is working they are slowly reducing the dose (she got 75% of her usual dose this time). Kim says that she can already feel the difference in her fingers so that is very promising.

My previous post on UBB was a little rambly so I'd like to take a moment to restate my views in a more succinct manner.

I find nothing inherently wrong with the idea of paying for Internet access based on the amount of bandwidth you consume. My problem is that the CRTC is allowing major telecoms to dictate policy on how Canadian consumers should be billed for Internet usage. Major telecoms whose primary revenue streams will soon be destroyed by the Internet, the thing they are trying to alter policy on.

I'm actually a bit disappointed that the national debate seems to just be centred around the UBB stuff and not around the larger issue of the sorry state of telecommunications in Canada in general.