that canadian girl

I was born at Montfort Hospital in Ottawa, Canada on September 19th 1981. It was a Saturday. (It was also the day Simon & Garfunkel reunited for a free concert in Central Park. Gotta love Wikipedia for the random facts…)

For the first 16 years or so of my life, I lived in Rockland, just outside of Ottawa, and would spend most of my days cursing it and saying how I wish I could leave the countryside for a bigger, more exciting and lively city. I spent 10 years at the École Primaire Ste-Trinité in Rockland, then escaped to the city, spending 5 years of high school at École Secondaire De La Salle in Ottawa. I joined the Vocal Music program that was offered there, which made a world of good to my academic and (otherwise non-existent) social life.

Towards the end of high school, I had the urge to travel and go live, work and/or study in Europe. Except when you’ve never travelled, Europe feels like a big colourful map where the only way to decide where to go is to play darts and go at random. Thankfully, I met a British guy who sorted out the indecisiveness for me.

I’ve since then finished a degree in Communications at Ottawa University, moved to the UK relatively permanently, worked in Publishing, got married to my wonderful British guy, Andrew, and seen much too little of the rest of Europe.

In the summer of 2005, we moved up near Cambridge (to a small town, strangely similar to the one I spent my youth cursing) and I started working with a wonderful team of geeks and marketers at Active Hotels in Cambridge, UK, on sites such as Priceline.co.uk and Active Reservations. In June 2006, I moved from B2C Business Development to Conversion Marketing within the company, taking over ownership of the company’s email newsletters under both the Active Reservations and Priceline guises.

In July 2006, I also started writing for Shiny Shiny: A Girl’s Guide to Gadgets, as tech columnist.