One Year

Hard to believe but yesterday (June 8) marked the one year anniversary of my resignation from the Industrial Commission in Columbus. It’s hard to believe that a whole year has gone by so quickly. I’ll never forget leaving the William Green Building for the last time on that day and leaving behind great friends and memories of the 15 1/2 years that I worked there. A week later, I closed the house on Saddlehorn Drive and drove up to Canada to start my new life.

A lot has happened since then and while I am far from being settled here, things are moving along. For one thing, I had zero social or professional network (except for martial arts buddies, Mike and David as well as my wife's family). I have made considerable headway since then; though I am not yet satisfied with the network I have thus far built up. I did a fun project a while back, assessing the size of network in Columbus built up over the years through work, martial arts, and my social life. The total came just under 1,200 people. I was astounded. So I have been fairly aggressive with the professional and martial arts networking up here since arriving here. I have been working downtown Toronto as a temp in the legal field since the beginning of the year and it is certainly a change of pace from what I used to do in Columbus but it beats not working. I have had a number of interviews, all of which have gone well but no luck yet. As someone once said to me, each “no” is merely a step closer to getting to “yes.” Very true. Along the way, I started teaching a Filipino martial arts class here in Oshawa and have 8 core students just after 3 months. I’m pretty pleased with this since it is difficult to attract people to Filipino Martial Arts. I plan on growing this as much as I can.

Do I feel settled in Canada ? Not by a long shot. The more I expand my social and professional network, the more settled I will feel. It will certainly help once people start moving into the houses in our part of the neighborhood and we start forming networks in there. Quite a few houses still remain unfinished and, consequently, unoccupied. It just takes time.