The Toronto Life

Gill and I departed Calgary in early January to come out to the big city. I had recently gotten into grad school and Gill had set up to write her MCAT in late January. We took the route through the USA. It was one hell of a drive and really put my new 2002 Jetta 1.8T to the test. We had loaded JJ (the Jetta) to the gills and were not expected as crazy a trip as what was ahead.
Northern Montana is a place mostly occupied by ideling Ford F-150s and guys in camo riding their quads into town. We did however find a place that served coffee by the hour to have lunch. I had never been to a place that had a hourly, daily and weekly rate for an endless cup of coffee. As we continued through the USA we found our way to Fargo North Dakota and a huge snowstorm. the roads had 2m snowdrifts on either side and the road itself about 2" of ice. The roads were so bad we ended up calling the third day short due to the fact the interstate was travelling at 40 mph due to the ice. After a night of drinking cheap American beer we finally were back on the road heading to Toronto. We rolled up around 4pm.
We had arranged to stay with my Uncle Ian's friend from high school Jamie and his wife Andrea. They were the best hosts ever even after our stay was lengthened from a week to three.

Gill and I spent two long weeks looking for a place and finally after many debockles found a place on Church and Isabella st. Our apartment is about 660 square feet, is on the tenth floor and has hardwood floors, a view of the CN Tower and thanks to 6 gallons of mis-tinted paint, a sweet paint job. The apartment is close enough to school that it is only a 15 min walk to get to class.

In my first semmester at U of T in the MEng program I took four classes: stochastic dynamic programming, ergonomics, reliability and advanced mechatronics. This was my first semester of school in eight months and it hit hard. Lots of work and lots of projects met with a class full of uber smart people who pushed me to learn. My favorite part of the semester was my term project for advanced mechatronics in which I designed and machined a working model that could control the inlet force to a pump by controlling the thermal expansion of the attached piping. This project took me way longer than I expected but I got to check out all sorts of interesting machine shops and labs at the school.

During my first semester I also got in touch with my boss from my 3rd co-op term in Calgary who pointed my towards a job opportunity out here near Toronto in Markham. After an interview and test I landed a job working for the summer in Markham at WorleyParsons as a piping engineer. Good times. One of the perks of the job is the hours. I work 9 hours a day 4 days a week then get off at 11am on Fridays!

The last thing that is new with me is that I contacted one of the professors that I took classes with at UVic, David Sinton, who is now coming out to U of T. He asked if I wanted to work with him this fall as a student in his lab. I accepeted and now I am going to be doing a masters of applied science with him come september.

That is my life in a nut shell. I thought that I would update this blog as it has been a while.