Today (33 to present)

As I am not sure if my family wants to be named on my website or not, I will not use their names or display their images here out of common courtesy.

Life was getting better for me. I moved into a nice two bedroom apartment with Lucy. I had a full-time, well-paying career. I lived really close to where I worked. I even joined a Star Trek meet-up group, where I've met quite a lot of interesting friends and even marched in my first parade. Then my company decided to switch directions and have all the publication builds sent out of the Edmonton office, which resulted in a large layoff.

I took this as an opportunity to try something new. I tried to go back to school to try my hand at VFX for Film and Television. I thought this is what I wanted to do, but after just one term, I realized that this was not for me at all and quit going. There was simply too much homework, and it wasn't really what I thought I was going to be learning about. Plus, I really needed money.

It's funny, because even though I was unemployed and collecting EI payments, which isn't a lot of money, I found myself a lot less stressed out about the situation as I was when I was married with both of us making the same amount of money. Possibly because I realized that I was in charge of my own money, and subsequently could make the right choices for myself with regards to what was necessary and what wasn't.

In June of 2010, the Star Trek Convention came back to Vancouver after a 10 year or so hiatus. I had never been to a Trek convention before in my life and decided I really needed to experience this at least once in my lifetime. With the money I received back from my taxes, I bought a weekend pass plus a photo opp with none other than William Shatner himself. I had so much fun at this event — even making a new friend there — that I decided I needed to do this again, and they announced it would come again next year.

A month after this convention, I finally landed another job in print design. I had all but given up on the idea of getting a job in print and decided to go into web design and see if I could get funding to do so with this so-called "Stimulus package". There was much paper work needed, and I found that I needed to conduct informational interviews in order to get this accomplished. I sent out a plea for an interview from someone on a meet-up site for graphic designers, and got contacted by someone who asked me if I was completely giving up on print or if I would be interested in working at her company. Long story short, I got hired on, but with much less pay than I was making before. In fact, it's pretty much entry level pay.

It's a fine job and I do enjoy working on children's books and so forth, which was much better than advertising for cars or the oil industry for me. There is very little doubt however that I will ever get a raise here, as it seems like the head boss is a bit of a penny-pincher. So, my new plan is to continue to learn web design (such as Dreamweaver and possibly Flash), so I can eventually look for another job.

I am also attempting to write a book about my life experiences, which I plan on starting once my website build is completed. As I am a fairly avid blogger, I noticed something about the process. I found myself constantly haunted by a certain event that occurred during my years of Hell in that crappy town. After years of remembering it with much anger and frustration, I decided to blog it out of me and write the whole experience down. I realized something quite profound about this event. After I wrote it down on my blog, I completely stopped thinking about it. I wasn't bothered by it any more and the thought never came back to me. I had purged it out of my system, so to speak. So now my attempt to write the story of my life has evolved out of the idea that maybe if I wrote it all out of me, I could finally put the pains of my life behind me and finally learn to move on with my life, possibly finding happiness along the way. Well, you can at least agree that it's a possibility, right?

I'm also attempting to lose weight now. After all the stuff I've been through, I found myself reaching for sugar a lot, also eating loads of cheese-smothered pasta. I am going to try to lose the 60 pounds I need to lose now. I have already lost 14 pounds since the beginning of 2010, but have sort of lost my way once again in the later half of last year and early part of this year. I will also stop eating out and stop going to 7-11 to get more junk food. I hope I will be able to lose 60 pounds this year. I'm really tired of being tired all the time, and want to see my weight fall back to what it once was back at the end of high school.

I'll update this page as more information comes available.