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BURRITO: Ok, here's the truth - I'm Lisa Brideau. Do you see the Burrito? That's the only way anyone has ever been able to make fun of my name - "Lisa Burrito", and it wasn't until grade 9 that someone thought it up. One day, in my infinite wisdom, I was sharing this tale with my other half - Peter - and he thought it was hilarious... and I've been Burrito ever since. I never thought it could be a term of endearment, but there you have it.
WEST: Peter and I up and quit our engineering jobs to enjoy some free time and then go back to school. We'd been working in the US for several years and wanted to get back to Canada. Also, we needed a break from working. Despite a strong urge to get back to Nova Scotia where I grew up, I find myself now in Vancouver. Yeah, wrong way, eh? Hence Burrito West. Unfortunately my reunion with NS will be delayed as I've falled head over heals in love with Vancouver. We sold our cars, moved downtown, and LOVE it.
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I was
born one (presumably) cold day in Halifax,
Nova Scotia. I
went home shortly thereafter to hang out with my sister and mom and dad.
I don't remember much about the next 15 years but there is excellent
documented evidence that I went to school, played, and had a lot of
haircuts. I was a cranky brat for much of my childhood but I think
I've grown out of that for the most part. I amused myself in school by
trying to get the highest marks I could, unless that required me to work
really hard in which case I would settle for something less than 100% as a
final grade.
I picked up short story writing as a habit fairly early on which seems to indicate I had an imagination but this thought is contradicted by the fact that I named my stuffed animals 'Bunny', 'Teddy', 'Clown, and 'Puppy'. |
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My
elementary school teachers should all be commended for pretending my early
stories made any sense and for not making fun of me for ending most of them
suddenly with "and then they all went home. The End." when I got
bored. I still love to write and still have problems with the endings;
I often just kill all the characters to be done with it. In high school I took my first physics course and was stunned to discover two things: 1) there is a use for math, and 2) there are equations that explain how the world works. It was a staggering revelation. It would later be torn to shreds by university level physics. |
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One day
in the yearbook office in my last year of high school, I found an old
brochure left behind by some previous yearbook staff. It was for a
place called Carleton
University. I'd never heard of it.
I was bored, so I looked through it and saw a program called "Aerospace Engineering". That sounded COOL! I applied and got in and thank goodness because all the other programs I applied to were pure physics and that would have sucked. I didn't exactly know what engineers did but I figured that would be made clear somewhere along the line, no sense getting bogged down in details. I packed up two huge
army duffel bags and flew to
Ottawa for the
first time ever. I moved into rez, signed up for engfrosh and was
started on an awesome four years of stress, good friendships, good times,
stress, parties, stress, and hard work. It was great. Except for the stress - did I mention the stress? I made a
pile of great friends (mutual suffering really brings people together) and
at the end I got a cool iron
ring. |
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While in
university I started
fencing and got to enjoy three years on the varsity women's foil team.
Thanks to my two experienced teammates, we kicked ass all over the place;
generally my job was to lose as few points as possible.
I graduated with my B.Eng after 4 years and promptly had my wisdom teeth removed. Then I moved to Wisconsin where my Peter was working, bummed around for a month, then weaseled myself a job at the same company. Shortly after starting work, we took off for a two week trip to Scotland (my reward to myself for graduating) which was AWESOME. Unfortunately we had to come back and work again. Working 8-5, five days a week, 49 weeks out of the year really never sat well with me. Every summer I expected to get a nice, 4 month break from the monotony but I didn't. I stuck with it for four years and finally couldn't take it any more - so we quit and fled back to Canada. I'd spent the four years wondering if I wanted to continue in engineering - I'd loved it in school, but the real world wasn't nearly was much fun. I knew if I continued in engineering I'd always be a desk jockey, always be working 8-5, and if I wanted to continue in the space industry there were very few cities I could choose to live in and most of them were ugly and not in Canada. |
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So after a lot of thought and a lot of time spent hating the ugly suburbs of Wisconsin, I realized I was much more passionate about urban planning/design anyway. I read a stack of books on it, audited a course at University of Wisconsin, and applied to some Masters programs in Canada. In 2004, Peter and I packed up some meager belongings, threw our cats in the car and started driving to Canada. I enrolled in UBC's School of Community and Regional Planning with an intent to focus on urban design and was very excited to go back to school and do something totally new. I graduated with an M.Sc in 2006 and started working as a planner in 2007. So far, it's pretty awesome. I find it endlessly fascinating. I also totally fell in love with Vancouver and urban living. We don't have a car - we walk and transit everywhere and it is fantastic. I don't think I can ever go back to the suburbs after this. The only downside to being here is that my family is on the complete opposite side of the country and it's disgustingly expensive to fly there. Someone needs to get on inventing teleportation. |
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Completing my immediate family are Kitty who we adopted in April 2002 (see above bit on my naming of stuffed animals to understand the name). We got her a friend from the animal shelter in October: Bernoulli (aka Noodle). They're both hilarious and are total siblings in the way they don't get along. I love them like crazy and it's a good thing we live in a small apartment because if we had a house I'd have 15 cats and be one of those crazy cat ladies.
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Kitty |
Bernoulli (ber-new-lee) |
