Freedom - Week 1

It's hard to believe it's been a week since the "End of November" crew was let go. I was at the company for three months shy of seven years. Lots of mixed emotions on the last day. On the one hand, there was a bit of relief, as responsibility was lifted off my shoulders, a bit of happiness for the opportunities ahead, and ,of course, a tinge of sadness for the parting of ways. I got to work with exceptionally bright, talented, and fun individuals that worked extremely well as a team. Many times, I've been happy to see people "come through" during crunch time, and help out those that needed it. We had one hell of a team, and one hell of a run, didn't we...

Here's a few pics from the End of November bash:





People that had left earlier even came back for this event, including Michael, Hallett, Martin, Mladen, and Geoff who is pictured below with Vivian:



Here's a pic of Jason's desk, Mr. QA Tech Lead, where a lot of us stopped by to harass him with our questions. Sadly we won't get to do that much anymore. He took some extreme measures and moved to DC to avoid us. But at least there's always Messenger.... hehe...



This pic was from the beginning of November, on Marty, Joel and John Li's last day. A pic of our much decimated Stability crew. I gotta give a special thank you to my Stability crew... I can say with all modesty that we were Awesomely Awesome. Yes we were. Go Team!




It still hasn't sunk in yet that I'm not working for a few months. I'm sure it will kick in at some point, but for right now, it feels like a vacation filled with lots and lots of studying, from which I am currently procrastinating to update this blog.

For the part that felt like a vacation: we took an excursion to Seattle. Spent way too much money at Tulalip on the way, but at least got a little bit of Christmas shopping done. Of course part of our spending went to ourselves. I bought the best hoody ever. Fleece lined and everything. Here's Emma modelling it:




We also went to a pretty crazy mall in Seattle, which had some high end stores including Restoration Hardware, Tiffany's, Coach, Max Mara on the bottom floors, and some full size restaurants on the top floor. We had dinner at the Thai restaurant there. Then we checked out the Movie theater that was also on the top floor, and saw the best Bond movie yet - Casino Royale. The movie theater was huge. The screen looked double the size of our Silver City ones here, and the seats reclined! It was pretty sweet....

As for the studying: I just finished my first course in the Applied Web Development program at BCIT. Below on the left side of picture is text book for the HTML/CSS course I took. I wrote my final yesterday, and I think I did ok. Though I must say, I hate writing code on paper with pen. Too many damn attributes and values to remember. And how many people actually have the damn Doctype declaration memorized... And yes that was on the test.

For the rest of December I get to study for the second part of the Canadian Securities Course, the textbooks which are on the right of the picture. Having already taken and passed the first exam, I can say that it will undoubtably be much harder than the HTML/CSS course.



At least I have my trusty guard dog to keep me safe while studying. Here she is, being ever alert and vigilant.



Back to studying...