The Relocation Saga – Part 1

It was May, 1999 when Janet and I decided to move from San Francisco back to the East Coast. Why did we move? Well, it was complicated. At the time, I was working for MCI Worldcom, and having just suffered through the merger from hell, I decided that it was just time to move on. Also, San Francisco was starting to get a little claustrophobic. Well, ok, maybe not San Francisco in general, but our little 300 square foot studio was getting to be a little cramped for the two of us and our two cats.

And let’s face it, if you’ve ever lived in a studio for five years with your spouse and cats, no matter how much you love them, you start getting bitchy over every little incident.

So we decided that it was time to move on… not just from our jobs and apartment, but that it was time to leave Sodom by the Bay and look for greener (and less expensive) pastures. We left the last week of May, 1999.

In all honesty, Hartford was pretty good to us. We made a significant bump in our standard of living, we developed in our careers and in May 2000, we even took the plunge and bought a condo. But even though things were looking up, there was still something missing. It took a while, but in May 2002, we finally figured out what had been nagging at us for the past couple of years.

We realized that Hartford, Connecticut sucked.

Yep. It took us a while, but we realized that Hartford just really sucked ass. Major ass. Major rat-bastard just crawled out of the gutter and smells like Newark sort of ass. I mean, at 8pm on a Saturday, there was nowhere within walking distance to get a beer, or an affordable meal… unless you wanted to go to the “slightly better than bud, but not as good as a bottle of year old Anchor Steam” brewpub or have pizza for the upteen-thousandth time. I mean really, can this veteran barfly live somewhere that to have a decent beer on tap required a 20 minute drive? I knew you’d agree.

So we started thinking about what to do next. The obvious choice was our favorite city at the time, Montreal. Unfortunately, as a US resident, getting sponsored for jobs in Canada is almost impossible, so that was scratched. With no real ideas of where to go next, I was sent to San Jose for a business trip. That was May, 2002. Eight years since we arrived in San Francisco, Three years since we left, two years since we bought the condo. We should have known at that point that something would be happening… because every major ife change happened in May.

Hell, we even met each other thirteen Mays ago.

So, I had the business trip to San Jose, and Janet decided to meet me for the weekend in San Francisco. Long story short, it was that first night at the Toronado after seeing our friends and adopted family here for the first time in years, we decided to move back.

Tune in for the next installment – Everything Falls Into Place.