When I write up a blog post, it normally doesn’t take very long. I write from the top of my head, sometimes the heart, and other times from a puddle of bile; stream of consciousness or capturing thoughts in a SharpMT window… the editing can take a while but the writing almost always comes quickly.

Except for today. Today I’ve started and re-started this post and I can’t seem to focus. I keep looking up at an azure sky and getting lost in my thoughts, thinking of times long past and continuously feeling surprised that these memories took place in WA, rather than in CT.

It’s summer again in Redmond and the weather will be happy for the next few months…

I’ve been here for ten years.

My first attempt at this post was taking shape as a retrospective. In fact, I took a moment to see what I was posting in June 2014 and as I expected, there was a number of posts dealing with moving, living in downtown Seattle, and figuring out where I wanted to live for the longer term… I’m still amused by my happy dance of joy I posted when my Jeep got here; I’m amazed that the Jeep is still alive and currently parked in my driveway.

Then I started thinking about work and the journey there. A few days ago, my Lead presented me my ten year service award in front of my group; he joked about how when I started in the industry that DOS was the platform of choice and asked me if I had any standout memories from the last decade. First thought? Knowing that when I started working out in the morning that I kept seeing Ballmer in men’s locker room, which kinda puts your CEO in a new light and frankly not a light you want to look at. Yeah, that’s great fodder for a group meeting. What else could I say? That I remembered the Great Towel Uprising of 2004? That when I joined the company we had finally stopped attaching .net to every product and Longhorn was still in active development? The 360 was being worked on out at the Millennium campus, Halo 2 was finally approaching beta, and I was actively smitten with Halo for PC; I had a PS2 delivered to my temp housing with GTA3 and that was the first console I owned since the NES. That Gates was still on campus daily and Studios West wouldn’t be built for five years? I joined the company to work on MSDN for Visual Studio 2005 as my first project and SDET’s were their own discipline; at the time the expectations was that SDET’s wrote more code than developers. It was too hard to pinpoint an event or even a gig at work to mention – there must have been at least 24 large projects across three divisions during the ten year span. In all honesty, it all felt like the distant past… I looked around at everyone and said, “Yeah, uh. I got nothin’.”

After thinking about all that… a retrospective didn’t feel right. I mean, so much has changed in my live – not least of which being Jolene who’s currently working across town and my son that is likely playing outside at his daycare center – that I almost believe that the blog can speak for me. It’s been my public journal during my time in WA… why rehash that what has been said?

And so, ten years after I landed at Sea-Tac with my first one-way plane ticket in my pocket, I realize that I’ve spent nearly one quarter of my life in WA now and my only misgiving is that I didn’t move here sooner than I did… and this from a person that had assumed he would be “the guy” that stayed in town to keep the memories of the past together and volunteer for the reunion meetings. Guess I misjudged that aspect of things.

Interestingly, I’m due to travel back to CT for a brief visit for family business, and that should be interesting. I’ve travelled back east over a dozen times – I honestly stopped counting but it’s likely close to 15 times – and more often than not, I’m home sick for WA after a couple of days there. Except for the coffee. Dunkin’ makes me forget about espresso and it takes about five days before that withdrawal kicks in. I also think it might time to remind people that there’s land west of the Hudson and we have room for visitors… what I started as a “four year college-like experiment that I can reverse if it doesn’t work out” seems to grown into a permanent change after all.

Strange how things can and will change, if you just give it enough time.