The picture to the right is of me in December of 2006. My name is Stacy, and I'm currently 28 years old. I was born in Yorkton, Saskatchewan, and grew up in various small towns around Saskatchewan, a mostly rural, farming province in the centre/west of Canada. At the age of 12, my family moved to another small town in Alberta, the neighbouring province to the west, and my mother still lives in this town.
I spent a year in Québec as an exchange student in 1994/95, and then in 1996, having graduated from high school back in Alberta, spent four years at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, pursuing a journalism and political science degree. By the time I earned it, I'd realized it wasn't what I wanted to do with my life, especially after spending a very memorable summer in New York City as a press intern/production assistant for a major Broadway production company. So I moved to Toronto in the hopes of finding a job in the theatre industry, and instead ended up in a job in insurance so that I could meet my student loan payments and other expenses.
What started as a six-month temp job turned into six and a half years, during which time I was promoted to a management position, where I managed six people who do administrative support for the casualty claims department. By most standards, it was a good job, but I still wanted something that stimulated and inspired me. So I made the decision to drop everything, and move to London for a while, and see what would happen.
This decision was made more difficult by the fact that all my family still lives in western Canada, which is a fair distance from England. 
My mom is my best friend in the world, and we talk on the phone regularly. The 7-hour time difference makes that a bit more difficult. My older brother married last year, and he and his wife have a little boy born this summer. My sister and her husband already have a beautiful little boy, who is two years old, and another baby on the way! My youngest sister has been living on her own and working as a nurse in labour & delivery for over a year, and my youngest brother is at college studying petroleum engineering (we're from oil country). It will be a long time before I see most of them again.
I've also left behind my companions in Toronto. My cat Tiger is 15 years old, and I met him the day after he was born in 1992. He was one of a group of kittens born to my friend's sister's cat, and we got to take one of them. Tiger lived at home while I went to university, but when I moved to Toronto in 2000, I brought him out to be with me, and he's been a wonderful comfort to me for all those years.
In August of 2005, I met a man named Todd, who was 
originally from Alberta, but was now living and working in the Toronto area. We quickly clicked, and it wasn't long before we were seeing each other at every opportunity. In March of 2006, we moved in to an apartment in Mississauga together, and in November of 2006, moved to a different apartment back in Toronto. It's incredibly hard not to see him for months at a time, but he's been very supportive of my desire to try my luck in London, and he's even looking after my Tiger while I am away.
So that's how I got to this point. If you want to know what happens next - well, you'll just have to come back and find out!
Some Likes & Dislikes:
Likes
Feeling loved
Skating on a clean sheet of ice
Snuggling under the covers on a rainy day with my kitty
Ben & Jerry's Chunky Monkey ice cream
The moment the curtain rises in the theatre
Christmas
Unexpected days off
Planning a trip
Buying someone else a present
Clean hardwood floors
The smell of bacon cooking
Dislikes
When people press the elevator button after it's already been pushed
Rain
Sucking up
Getting to the Toronto airport
Long distance charges
Stephen Harper
When a trip is over
This site has been around since 1998, as a sort of companion piece to my much larger project, Stacy's Musical Village. If you'd like to see some of the many designs that the site has had over the years, click here!
