It's only been well over a year since I wrote anything meaningful on this blog. I have been re-he-he-heally busy... and it's been an insane year. I am finally off of my project, and on vacation, awaiting reassignment to another project.
Lemme fill ya'll in on what's happened since I last wrote.
The last time I posted, I was employed at a videogame developer in St Catherines Ontario, where I was working on an X-Men game published by Activision. I lived in St Kitt's in my first purchased house with my lovely wife and 3 amazing kids. We had a great life (full of Monster Cereal).
For some of us in the games industry, we develop a type of 6th sense regarding job stability. Something in the air changes when you're about to get laid off or downsized or outsourced. I (fortunately or unfortunately depending on how you look at it) developed the ability to sense that change in the air early on. I began to sense it at the place where I was working. Call it intuition, or call it plain-to-see-your-employers-were-about-to-tank, I started weighing my options. I applied for a job at Ubisoft Entertainment in Montreal, and lo and behold, got it.
The problem was, we owned a house. We had just invested almost $20,000 in renovating it, and we didn't want to rent it. We didn't have enough money to carry two mortgages so we decided my wife would stay behind with the kids and sell the place through ComFree (a real-estate agency where the home owner sells does all the footwork, thus drastically reducing the cost... and eliminating the commission... very nice, in theory). We figured it would take a month, maybe two to sell our place. We were very, very wrong.
I now look back on 2011.5 to 2012.5 as my 'lost year'. After the first month, I moved into a friends basement bedroom (one of the silver linings, was to develop a relationship with these amazing people). I spent the year working very hard on a game am now very proud of, and going back to St Catherines (via megabus.com) every 2 to 3 weeks. It really, REALLY sucked.
I should go back and say that a few things happened that affected the sale of our property. For one, after about 3 or 4 months, we decided to give up on Comfree and hire a real-estate agent to sell our house. We were very excited by the prospect of a quick sale... at first.
Second, the company I was working for in St Catherines imploded as I had predicted. I was hoping to have my house sold before that happened, as it caused an over-saturation in housing in that area, which seemed to be a real setback.
We were feeling insanely discouraged and defeated. My kids were now growing up in a province that wasn't the one I was living in and it was killing me. It baffles me how anyone can willingly live far away from their kids.
This continued until May 2012 when we FINALLY got an offer on our house! Interestingly, the person who made the offer was a contact who knew of the house from when my wife was selling the house herself (grumble grumble... why couldn't they have just bought it THEN?). We haggled a bit, but essentially, we were prepared to just dump the place so we could get on with our lives. We sold the house. Although it was amazing news, it was also very sad to say goodbye to some of the best neighbors we had ever had.
In June, my wife and the kids came to stay with me in Montreal so we could find a place. It's all a bit of a fog now looking back on it. We bought a place and moved in in July (after a crazy hairy adventure for another blog post). We've been together ever since. All is well. Very well.
As I said at the start of this post, I am on vacation, in between projects. Today, we are going down to NY state, just south of Quebec to find Monster Cereal.
