Welcome readers to the tenth (yes, you read that correctly, that's 10th) year of the Internet-famous Grenoble WMD Blog. Actually, after just one year had passed since its inception, we would have been in the second year so I guess technically this is the 11th year of the Blog, but the important point is that in around 2 weeks from now, Pemulis and Joelle will have been European residents for a full decade. That is some scary Scheiße.
The scariest part of it by far (while the sheer large amount of time is quite up there) is how much stuff one (or two or now actually four) can accumulate over the course of a tenth of a century (keeping in mind that the 3rd and 4th were only actually present for some portion of those ten years and therefore only contribute so much). Yeehaw one of these days we're gonna have to put on one heck of a mean garage sale.
While the official ten year anniversary of our arrival is almost 3 weeks away, I think that now is as good a time as any to start a series of celebratory posts to mark this momentous occasion in both the Blog's life (not that many blogs have existed for more than a decade you know) but also our own. In this particular instalment, let's take a step 3650 days into the past and begin that dangerous exercise where you see what's changed and what hasn't over the course of a good chunk of time.
The biggest difference is of course that now we have both a record player and a cargo bike. In other words I'm able to now say that my goals for adulthood have been met. Not bad for the "ten year challenge". Other minor differences include the fact that I lost all my hair, I now enjoy eating white sausage for breakfast, we can no longer come anywhere close to living our lives to the fullest due to a major global pandemic (though I guess we're not at all unique in that regard), and we have two kids. All the other differences fall somewhere down in the cracks.
It hasn't all been strawberries and rainbows, of course. While the ten year challenge was started by Facebook at the behest of the US government as a simple way to update their facial recognition databases and build more powerful models that could predict what fugitives, dissidents, and climate activists living in the shadows might look like in the time since a viable picture was able to be snapped, the general principle of "seeing how far you've come" in ten years can have a painful side as well. At a societal level there's of course the pandemic. Think about the freedoms you took for granted ten years ago that we can only dream about today. But personally for the Pemulis Family, we are forced to contend with the fact that ten years ago, we could imagine a future where we could travel back to Canada any time we wanted. Oh wait, that's back to Covid stuff again. Wow it's hard to think much about anything else these days.
But for once let's try to focus on some good, shall we? Some kind of festivity tied into this whole ten years in Europe celebration thing and connected to something new in our lives. Ready? We are now connoisseurs (well, appreciators at least) of Port Wine. Man if you drink a real bottle of Port? Not that shit from the grocery store but an actual real live bottle of Port? Wow. Now that's a real experience that we needed to reach the ripe old age of 40 to understand. Good God. I know we're missing out on the whole legal marijuana in Canada thing but we do have Port here. And Port is good. Well, come to think of it, I presume that one can also buy real port in Canada. So I guess the goodness dies down a bit. BUT, I think we can say that appreciating Port is something to celebrate in a ten year challenge sort of way. Maybe. I'll just go find out...
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