2009 - The Year of Stability

I struggled a bit with what to call this year. We had:

• 2006 - The Year of Adventure - As I set out from Canada on my Eurotrip, culminating with my 5 months internship in Denmark.
• 2007 - The Year of Knowledge - As I started my amazing 8 month job for Soloy in Seattle and then moved to France to start my Masters.
• 2008 - The Year of Commitment - Not only were more and more of my friends back home making the commitment of marriage, I made the commitment to stay here in France at least three more years for this PhD.

So that brings us to 2009; what could I call the year 2009? Finally the word hit me, stability. Why stability? Well because 2009 was, for the first time in a long time, a stable year.

For starters, 2009 brought me a stable full time job for the entire year! I started at Airbus with my job/PhD in Feburary of 2009. And with this brought money, finally money! After 7 years of being a poor student, I finally am bringing home "l'argent", how sweet it is.

2009 also was a year without moving. After leaving Canada in 2006 i've been all over the map. Traveling, then 4 months in Denmark, then back to Canada for a month, then to Olympia for 8 months then to France to the student dorms, then to my apartment here in Toulouse. Then back to Canada again for 2 months while I waited on the work contracts to get finalized. But now, I'm stable. I'm in Toulouse. I have an incredible apartment. I got incredible lucky to find a great roommate on the first try at the beginning of 2009 and most of all...I'm just really comfortable in Toulouse. It has truly become my home. I love the city, I love the job, I have a great group of friends here, 2009 was the year that Toulouse, France became home.

So, that's where the Year of Stability label came from. So...what actually happened in 2009.

I came back to Toulouse in early January, eager to finally start my new job with Airbus. I also had to find a new roommate after my old roommate Vladimir got a job back in Barcelona. I was a little apprehensive, because finding a roommate just seems it can be really hit and miss. You just never know what your going to get. But I got lucky and Ignacio was one of the first guys to respond to my roommate request, and right upon meeting him, it seemed things were good. So he moved in at the end of January.

February came and the paperwork was finally finalized and work started. So what is my work. As many know I'm doing a PhD, but not really a PhD in the traditional sense because I'm doing the PhD with Airbus. That is, with the company, it's an industrial PhD. The best part is, I'm just like any other employee, meaning I receive my salary, benefits, vacation exactly like any other worker..so in that sense it's a job. But the work I'm doing for Airbus is in the research department, and as such I'll be writing a PhD thesis in two more years time... so in that sense it's a PhD.

Starting a PhD is never easy. Basically the first three months my job entailed "read all of this" in order to get a fundamental foothold into the subject. I did have some distractions, in helping trouble shoot another project that was going on, but the majority of the time was spent reading. Unfortunately the middle part of the year, had me feeling a bit frustrated at work. I felt I had done enough reading and was ready to move on, unfortunately there was just too many other things going on at Airbus. As such, my tutor at Airbus was simply swamped trying to finish off another project, as well as his wife having their second baby, in addition with the usual slowdown at Airbus during summer due to everyone in France being on vacation. So here comes September, and I really felt that 8 months of my PhD had slipped away without any real forward movement.

But Jerome my tutor is really a great guy. So we had a great conversation in September, finally he was a bit less swamped at work and we had some planning meetings along with my other tutors from the laboratory and university. And since then it has really taken off. There is a focus in my work, and a real plan forward. I guess what excites me the most about this job is the potential impact of my research. I really am excited about working on something that can make a difference in the safety of all aircraft. I can't get into details on the blog, but I'm working on aircraft take-off and landings on contaminated runways (i.e. snow, ice, standing water etc..) and this is the leading type of aircraft accident. 25% of aircraft accidents are the airplane running of the end of the runway. So to be working on a real world problem and trying to come up with a solution, it's really what drives me at work.

So that is 2009 from a work prospective, how about outside of work.

Well one of the advantages (and one of the reasons I chose to stay in France) is the vacation time, so that I can continue to travel and explore the world! And that I did! 2009 brought a record number of kilometers flown with over 60,000km's!!

Logan's Flights 2009

In Miles 37,654

In Kilometer 60,598

Earth Circumnavigation 1.51 x

Distance to the Moon 0.158 x

Distance to the Sun 0.0004 x

All 30

Domestic 2

Intra-Continental 17

Intercontinental 6

Other flights 5

So we had our annual "Go East" trip in May, and this year we chose to go to Romania which was incredible.

Then in June I visited my good buddy Manuel in Brussels, Belgium where he was doing an internship.

I had Paris in July where I met up with my old Hungarian roommate Baly, afterwards he came to Toulouse and we hung out here for a week.

Jasmin came to visit me in August and we took a road trip inside France to Dax for the Feria.

September came my "official" summer vacation. Myself and two friends from work, Antonello and Adrien spent 15 days exploring Oman in the Middle East.

October was my first 'business' trip as I flew from Toulouse to Bristol to present at the Airbus PhD day where I won the prize of "Best Poster Presentation". And October also brought us a random Halloween trip to Dublin simply because Halloween is awesome and France doesn't really celebrate it. Therefore we had to go somewhere!

December was the craziest month of travel with Leslie's wedding in Mexico during the first week. So I crossed the Atlantic, went to the wedding, flew back across the Atlantic, went to work for 12 days, then flew back to Canada for Christmas! Too much time spent in an airplane in December that's for sure.

And voila...2009 simply flew right by!

I'm now officially 1/3 of the way done my PhD. I'm enjoying life in Toulouse, we go skiing on the weekends in the winter, we go out to the bars for a drink during the week, go to quiz night (where we consistently finish in the top 3) or jam-okee night or play poker, or play football (soccer).

I finally found some soccer teams to play on. Since i'm still 'officially' a student I'm playing on the university team. I also found a regular men's league team to play on, in addition the inter-Airbus leagues runs from February to May where "Team Peformance" made it to the quarter finals. Ummm what else. We had a great camping trip that I organized for 12 of us in May. We did some hiking and mountain climbing. Summer brought many a trip to the beach since we are only 150km's from the Mediterranean.

I guess the other big thing in 2009 was my French. I started 2009 still very low in my French level. I could obviously speak a bunch of words but I still wasn't very fluent, and too slow. 2009 was a huge improvement. My daily working life at Airbus is in French, in that the majority of my conversations with c0-workers and meetings and emails are in French. And so my learning came much faster. I wouldn't say i'm 100% fluent at this point (i'm not really comfortable giving presentation in French, and French emails still take me twice as long to write) but i'm conversationally fluent. I don't have to think about what to say the majority of the time. So that makes a huge different in living here, because language was the single biggest frustration I had living here in France.

Overall, I would say it was just a great year. It's great to be stable and comfortable in all aspects of life. It's a good feeling.

So here's hoping 2010 just continues that trend!