... Toronto employed, Moscow paid

This part has been the most eventful, but it's also the simplest to explain.

I was hired over the phone by a start up at was in Aurora, Ontario at the time. They were working on the career section of the The Globe and Mail website. We had all the fun of being startup in the early 90s: working out of the attic, getting some office space in a warehouse, finally getting a nice large area that looked like the bridge of the Enterprise.

I did that for until 2001 when I took a job working on the Intranet for a big Bay St law firm. That was a great culture shock for me as I went from jeans and concert t-shirts to shirts and ties. I actually do miss wearing the ties all the time. Once I got used to it, there was something about it I liked. I was a mini Barney Stinson. After a few years there I went to ANOTHER Bay St law firm, where I actually got to do application development. From there it was another jump to client analysis with a software house to my current position as a business analyst for a company with offices in Toronto and Moscow. Considering my interest in Soviet history in university, I've managed to close that loop.

During that time I met Dawn. Our first conversation was based on a shared love of Ralph Wiggum and the fact that we seemed to have been the only people we knew who had seen The Spanish Prisoner. We started dating, moved in together, got engaged, got our house and got married. We even used to work in the same law firm for a few years (we were already together before I started there) without breaking any confidentiality agreements.

Since moving to Toronto I've seen a lot of concerts, met a lot of great people, been published, been sacked, been promoted, been quoted. I've traveled through parts of the world I never thought I'd ever go to, seen works of art I've only ever read about, and been to Cleveland 3 times. In a way it's been the most fascinating time of my life, but it's also the shortest to write about, because there are a lot of great stories that came out of that time, stories which I'll probably post here from time to time...like maybe...the story of the first time I saw the CN Tower.

But that's for another time.