It Begins

This seems like a good time to begin a personal blog. The year has been full of changes and transitions, and for those with whom I haven't spoken in a while, I have updates to provide.

Most importantly, my wife is coming back to Chicago, and we're going to live like an actual married couple again. Though being a "commuter couple" is oh-so-trendy (many are doing it, and the lifestyle even had an article in TIME Magazine this year), we've had a long-distance marriage since August 2007, not too long after our first anniversary. Seeing each other only a couple of times a month does not help when trying to build a life together. We never intended to be apart for this long. The planets of our professional lives just aligned in strange ways.

Without getting into the details (that's for B to disclose), her work took her to Washington D.C. at the end of August 2007. During this time, legal proceedings were underway in America and Europe to approve Google's bid to acquire DoubleClick, the company in which I had worked up from a sofware developer, to a technical lead, to an engineering manager. The deal was expected to close in April 2008, after which I would learn whether or not I still had a job. If I was laid off, I would move to DC and look for a job there; if I became a Google employee, we would figure out what our options were and do our cost/benefit calculus. (Google stock was still in the 800s at the time.) Either way, we expected things to be decided before the summer of 2008.

But come April, instead of hiring or firing me outright, Google offered me a one-year contract with a completion bonus hefty enough that I couldn't take my wounded pride and simply storm out the door. So we remained in limbo, with me needing to stay in Chicago until April 2009, and with no good reason for B to leave DC, where she had found both interesting work and success in her career.

Mentally preparing myself for moving to Washington DC was a process. I love Chicago. I love our River North loft, walking distance from my last two jobs. I love the friends I have here, and I love the cheap Southwest Airlines flights from Chicago to Omaha, so I can visit my parents. But I love B and her professional happiness too, and if I can't put my wife's needs ahead of my own, then I've failed to learn the lessons of the third Spider-Man movie. For the record, I would have done it. I would have moved to DC, and done so cheerfully, when the time came. But again, events took a different turn. B found a new opportunity in Chicago, which made the issue moot.

B and I are excited that she's coming home, even as we acknowledge that we'll have to get past our "set in our independent ways" mentality again, just like when we got married. It's a little bittersweet, because she has made some great friends in DC -- good people who have taken care of her and made sure she didn't get too lonely. I think I value them for that almost as much as she does. B's departure will be bittersweet, but mostly sweet. My baby's coming home!