We're about to exit the third decade that I and most of the readers of this journal have existed in. 2010 always seemed so far off, and it's very difficult to comprehend that we're actually going to be living in it in several hours' time (or you already are, if you're anywhere near Australia).

I've seen a few people going through the decade in review, and it was only when thinking through it myself that I realized just what a large amount of time it had been since 90s evaporated... I can't go into it in the kinds of epic detail that billy1987_1994 managed, but here's a quick summary of my life each year in the 2000s.

2000 - Even though my mental clock seems to be stuck in believing that we're only just past the year 2000, when I think about it, this really was an awfully long time ago. I still remember being round at the neighbours' house, with a glass of champagne in hand (festooned with accidental streamers from a party popper), watching the countdown to the massive and exciting date changeover and waiting to see if the Millennium Bug would blow up the world. I was to turn sixteen this year, which I'm sure felt a lot older than it does now. I was doing '1984' by George Orwell in English with Mr Cybulski, and sat my first real school exams in the form of the Standard Grades. Looking back on it, my life has changed rather a lot since then... I could certainly never have guessed I'd be married and living in America within ten years.


2001 - I had yet to escape from school, but after the pressure of the Higher exams to get us into university came the relative utopia of sixth year, a largely optional year of school where the emphasis is often on giving something back to the school rather than taking classes if you didn't need to. Nobody had this more than I did - thanks to a separate computer science course where we all had to be bussed to Huntly on Fridays, and failing admirably for the first time in my life at my physics and maths classes due to not really being able to see how they mattered, I ended up with nine hours of class a week and my first non-free period placed as the last thing on a Tuesday.

I was 17 this year and - only just - had my first girlfriend, a girl called Amy who had been to my school but hadn't taken a sixth year and lived a few miles away from me. At this stage, I considered this quite a long distance. We met when she fell asleep on me during the last hour of the year at a party, and from there the relationship went between varying degrees of imaginary. It consisted of us hesitantly phoning each other up and my contributions to the conversation being several shades of grunts to acknowledge that I was still listening, spending time with friends, at least one actual date with just her and me where we went to see Spiderman, another night with four or five other people sharing the room after the school-leavers' prom, and other than that, a lot of cuddling quietly in our families' living rooms after everyone else had gone to bed.


2002 - As described above, the start of this year was naturally fantastic (though less so for my parents, because their tax increased slightly because I wasn't technically in full time education any more). I passed my driving test (first time!) at the end of the summer, having applied for my provisional one as soon as my 17th birthday had arrived, but it took me a while to get up the courage to actually drive alone. I immediately became my group of friends' taxi, and being able to drive certainly made the relationship easier seeing as we didn't have to rely on the bus any more, but it was to dissolve very soon afterwards anyway and it's probably just as well. The next one would be from a lot more than a few miles away.

Then came the first big move of my life, down to university - it didn't hit me that I would be moving out from home, with a new permanent address, until I got down there and we began to set up my room/cell in Reinforced Concrete Eyesore Hall. Despite having a helpful booklet from the hall that was honestly called "Life without Mum" and provided instructions on how to make a bed and use a microwave, I was very lost at first, and having come straight from a relationship I made a lot of mistakes this year. But without those, I wouldn't have been shaped into becoming what I am now... less of an idiot. So I have to look back and be grateful for the turmoil.


2003 - It may sound slightly cliched to say that my life changed forever at one point, but this was the year I met Whitney. In November she had come up from Oxford to visit her friend, who happened to be the girlfriend of one of my friends in university. The group's first action with her was to go out to the cinema to see Love Actually, where I noticed that she was sitting on the edge of the group and climbed over a couple of rows of chairs to sit next to her so that she wasn't alone on the end. Then she pointed out how nice the cinema ceiling was and we leaned back and looked at it together. We fooled about kissing each other when bowling the next night, but I was still monumentally clueless and it took her pulling her towards me and kissing me on the beach during a walk at night for me to finally get the hint. Over the next few years we'd visit each other in St Andrews, Oxford, Berkeley and Sarah Lawrence College.

Earlier than that, this year also marked the start of this Livejournal, which was eventually to increase my online presence to dangerously high levels. It was started during the time when you needed invites for the privelege of pouring out your execrable angsty blatherings, and I was given one by mercuryanna. This was part of my general group of university friends starting them simultaneously so that we could keep in touch with each other, as many were JYAs from various parts of America - I was one of the most hesitant to start one and my writing was completely atrocious at the time, but it's ironic that now I think I'm the one out of that group of friends who uses his by far the most.


2004 - I'm certainly glad of the Livejournal now because it serves to replace my memory - without having to rely on my own brain it seems my actual department for placement of significant events just shut down at this point and I had to check back to see what I'd written this year. Apparently I went to America for first time this summer - to Berkeley, to stay at Whitney's parents' house. It was a completely new experience because I'd never been out of Europe before, and long-haul flights were new to me as well - I really can't believe I survived eleven hours with just a CD player and two in-flight movies. This was also the year that I was working at Kintore Golf club, a significant thing to mention because these days I really cannot fathom why anyone would ever put me in charge of preparing food for other people, or entrust me with their own survival of a sausage sandwich. I'm not sure how they're doing now, but last time I checked they were underwater.


2005 - Whitney and I were engaged in January of this year. After a summer of the most welcomingly bone-idle job I've yet had, amounting to reading around the Internet waiting for someone to invent Youtube and occasionally entering new people into a database as they came in, I drove to the airport at the end of this summer and picked her up, starting us living together for the first time. This was the year that my parents bought their second property, a flat in Cupar near St Andrews (they had been looking at estate agents all over the place all the time even when we were on holiday there when I was very young), and we were its first occupants. Even though we'd changed from living thousands of miles away to being in the same flat, I honestly didn't notice a difference, it felt that natural. This was now my fourth year of university, and it felt slightly like I was doing it part-time, commuting in and dropping off Whitney at her work at the simulator company on the way and picking her up on the way back.


2006 - The first half of this year was mostly spent in producing my grand Senior Honours Project, which in direct competition with the rest of the year to produce the worst acronym was called the SSSSS, or Solitaire Specification, Simulation and Solution System. It's still the most significant thing that I've coded alone in Java.

After completing my degree, I was once again ripped out of the world that I thought I was prepared for and it all reformed into something far more incomprehensible - America. After struggling with the US immigration authorities, answering about fifteen emails a day from my perpetually worried mother, eventually hiring an immigration lawyer and and being put on various kinds of medication as a result of the severe mental trauma that it all caused, I finally got there about a week before the crucial date, and Whitney and I were married in August. We spent a few days in Disneyland for our honeymoon, and then jetted off to start a new life in Boston, where I got a job that I've held to this day.


2007 - Tragically I have to admit that this is the year I started Crystal Towers 2. I'm going to finish it eventually. Otherwise, I find myself struggling to say anything about 2007 - does life just stop once you're out of school? How distressing. I honestly had to page through my journal to see if anything significant happened, and found:

1. I was named by someone or other at Indygamer as having written one of the top 10 freeware platformers of the last year
2. I got my first piece of writing published, after sending a collection of columns into a free newspaper, where they threw out everything except one paragraph about biscuits and cut out the funny bit at the end.


2008 - Once again, we just sort of lived through this year (having no really significant personal events is a good thing, sometimes). My workplace moved slightly closer to me when we moved out of the giant office above the health centre to a little space in an IT building. President Obama was elected, and it was excellent - we're still waiting for amazing changes to the world, but I've now seen first-hand that it's not easy when you're competing with this lot. I followed the election very closely and forgot to stop when it was over, so I now keep up with Political Wire for my daily dose of enragement and flabbergastation.


2009 - Which brings us to here. Unfortunately for me, the biggest event that I can remember from this year was when I had to go to hospital during the summer in the middle of a set of knock-on diseases (at about the same time that the swine flu outbreak happened). But I came back after a couple of months away and still had a job - that's job security for you. Incidentally, I can't help but noticing that we're all still not dead.

I also went to another new country for the first time, to Mexico with Whitney's family on a cruise paid for by her grandmother. Granted, we spent most of the time in the pool on the ship and I must only have had my feet on the ground in the country for a combined total of about three hours, but I was there nonetheless.


That was longer than I'd intended, but then, what isn't? If the next decade continues like the end of this one, then I can see the post in ten years' time being a lot shorter, but who knows where I'll be then. Given the difference between now and ten years ago, it could be very different from how I imagine it.