Author: Edward Caissie

The year 2013 stood out more than past years, enough so to write this post..

Our “babies” left us this year … our babies being our fancy pet rats. We rescued, and provided a sanctuary at times, as well as adopted fancy pet rats for close to ten years but as difficult as it was we chose to take a pause in that work this year with the passing of our last babies over the summer time. They are beautiful, intelligent, addictive little creatures but we are among the few that see them that way and they require a great deal of work to ensure they live a safe and comfortable life. A life any family pet deserves.

I changed jobs this year, some may even say I started a new career, too. I spend nearly 25 years with E.C.E. (Canada) Ltd. serving many roles with many titles but essentially it could all be boiled down to customer service. It was a tumultuous year for E.C.E. as well with new ownership taking over but they will survive and strive if by nothing more than the passion of that new ownership … or so at least I firmly believe and wish them all the best going forward with.

After many months of discussions and negotiations I started my second career as the Lead Happiness Engineer – NextGEN Gallery at Photocrati Media; in its essence a customer service role but one with great potential for growth. The opportunities offered by a small company can be immense, especially one that is building its product offering on the WordPress platform. Obviously there is the possibility of growing the Lead Happiness Engineer role, but there is also the possibilities of being able to actually use my WordPress knowledge and the code writing skill sets I have built as well with contributions to the Photocrati Media products currently being offered and the new products, features, and options being considered for the future.

We, Terri and I, traveled this year, too. It wasn’t that we has set out in the beginning of the year to cross something off our bucket lists but we created the opportunity all the same. We rode the world famous trolley cars of San Francisco. Although we had far reaching plans to visit the Grand Canyon, Yosemite Park, and the Hoover dam (not necessarily in that order) the US Government happen to “close” at the same which was actually quite fortunate in hindsight as our travel plans were forced to be drastically changed but, also in hindsight, our west coast vacation was a much better holiday. We stayed in Monterey for a few days and then moved up to San Francisco for a few more days.

Looking forward to 2014 already has a significant event on the horizon, Terri and I will be celebrating our 20th wedding anniversary … not certain what else this year holds for us but we have each other and I am certain we will have things to do and places to see.

Happy New Year!