It all started in Newfoundland
I was born in Carbonear, Newfoundland, in July 1980 and grew up primarily in Port aux Basques during the school year, where my father was a teacher, but summers were spent in Heart's Delight-Islington, the hometown of both of my parents.
So I got a little bit of both sides of Newfoundland life: western Newfoundland most of the year and Trinity Bay every summer.
Newfoundland has always remained home in one way or another. Even after spending most of my adult life in Ontario, there's something about going back that immediately feels familiar and yes, after all these years in Ontario, I still consider myself a Newfoundlander.
I believe the statute of limitations on that is somewhere around 175 years.
I'm a Newfoundlander born and raised and I'll be one till I die.
Growing up in Newfoundland, long before I had servers, smart homes or any idea I'd end up living in Ottawa.
School... I survived
I graduated from St. James Regional High School in Port aux Basques in 1998.
I wasn't the kid winning every academic award. I also wasn't the kid whose parents were constantly getting calls from the school (maybe the RCMP once or twice). I existed quite comfortably somewhere in the middle.
After high school, I moved to St. John's with plans to attend college. I had been accepted into one program but was waiting to hear about another, so I decided to hold off for a year. That resulted in a year of working, living in St. John's and enjoying being an 18-year-old with relatively few responsibilities.
College, computers and the road to Ottawa
In the fall of 1999, I started the Programmer Analyst program at the College of the North Atlantic. It was a three-year program with three work terms. My first was with NATI in the summer of 2000, my second was with the Government of Newfoundland during the winter of 2001, and then came the third.
In September 2001, I packed up and headed to Ottawa for my final Government of Canada co-op placement. I'd barely been in Ottawa a week when September 11 happened.
At the time, I certainly didn't know that this final college work term was going to determine the direction of pretty much the rest of my life, but it did.
Adam Sooley
Newfoundland -> Ottawa
About a month before graduating from college in 2002, I was offered a full-time position with the Government of Canada. So Jodi and I packed up our lives in Newfoundland and moved to Ottawa.
What was supposed to be the beginning of my career became the beginning of pretty much everything else too.
Ottawa became home.
Over the years my career moved from hands-on technology and web development into project management, business and financial management, leadership and eventually managing teams working in finance, network security and web development.
Technology changed quite a bit along the way, thankfully. I don't particularly miss building sites for Internet Explorer 6.
Jodi and I
Jodi has been there for basically this entire adventure.
- Newfoundland.
- Ottawa.
- Apartments.
- Three houses.
- Two kids.
- Dogs.
- Vacations.
- Concerts.
- Home renovations.
And a steadily increasing amount of technology appearing around our house that I'm sure I mentioned to her before buying at least I think I mentioned it.
The Blue Jays proposal
In the summer of 2008, Jodi and I headed to Toronto with a couple of friends to watch the Blue Jays.
What she didn't know was that I had arranged to propose to her on the Jumbotron at the SkyDome. Yes, I know it's officially called the Rogers Centre, it's still the SkyDome.
Thankfully, she said yes, otherwise this section would be considerably more awkward.
Toronto, 2008. She said yes. Good thing, because putting it on the Jumbotron made Plan B somewhat difficult.
September 26, 2009
On September 26, 2009, Jodi and I got married in Greely, just outside Ottawa.
Surrounded by family and friends, we officially started the next part of our lives together and our family wasn't finished growing, not even close.
Then there were four
In 2011, we welcomed our first daughter. Then in 2014, slightly after moving to Greely and apparently deciding that sleep was overrated anyway, we welcomed our second.
Becoming a dad changed life more than any move, house, job or piece of technology ever could.
Our girls are growing up here in the suburbs of Ottawa and somehow those babies are turning into two young women considerably faster than anyone warned me they would.
They've also become my partners for concerts, vacations, sporting events and all sorts of adventures that inevitably end up becoming posts on this website.
Some families keep photo albums, I apparently write blog posts.
2011 and 2014 somehow weren't nearly as long ago as they feel.
Three houses, one home
Our lives in Ottawa can almost be divided into chapters based on where we lived and apparently we like moving every few years just to make sure we haven't accumulated too much free time.
Riverside South: 2006 -> 2014
After spending our first few years in Ottawa renting, we bought our first house in Riverside South in 2006, our first house.
Our first opportunity to discover that when you own the house, there is no landlord to call when something breaks. Instead, you stare at the problem for a while and eventually say how hard can this be?
That sentence has probably cost me thousands of dollars over the years, still, that first house was ours.
It's where we really started building our life in Ottawa and where our family began to grow.
Greely #1: 2014->2021
By 2014, we had one kid, one on the way and considerably more stuff than two adults should reasonably be able to accumulate, so we moved to Greely, just south of Ottawa and where we got married a few years earlier.
We traded Riverside South for a little more space and a more rural community.
This house ended up becoming much more than simply house number two.
It was where we spent seven incredibly busy years, where our girls went from being very little to having personalities, opinions and schedules of their own, and where a lot of the stories that eventually made their way onto this site happened.
Where the girls grew up
When we moved to Greely in 2014, our oldest was only two and a half and our youngest still was not born but she was a short week after we moved in.
By the time we left in 2021, they were 10 and seven.
Those seven years were filled with all the things that come with raising two kids: first days of school, birthdays, friends, activities, family trips, Christmas mornings, summers outside and countless little moments that didn't seem particularly significant at the time, looking back, they were.
It's strange how a house quietly becomes the background to an entire stage of your family's life. Paige probably don't remember much about our first house in Riverside South but they'll remember this one.
2014 to 2021: Seven years doesn't sound like very long until you look at how much your kids changed.
Shut in with the Sooley's
Then 2020 happened. Like everyone else, we suddenly found ourselves spending a lot more time at home, a lot more time. So naturally, we did what any perfectly normal family stuck together during a global pandemic would do. We made a YouTube show.
Shut in with the Sooley's became our little family project during those strange early days of COVID.
- It wasn't exactly Netflix.
- There was no production crew.
- There were no trailers.
- There definitely wasn't a special-effects department.
- There was just us.
- Stuck at home.
- With a camera.
It gave us something fun to do together during a period when nobody really knew what was coming next, and it captured the kids at a very particular moment in time. Years later, that's probably the best part about it.
The videos aren't just something silly we put on YouTube, they're a little time capsule of our family.
Behind the scenes of the homemade studio
No creation is complete without a blooper reel
Sharing the spotlight, our brief attempt at becoming YouTube celebrities during lockdown. Netflix never called.
Sadie's first solo video
And then there was Legionnaires disease
Not every memory from this house was funny. This was also the house connected to one of the stranger and much more serious experiences I've written about on this site: Legionnaires disease.
It's one of those things most people have heard of but probably never expect to have any personal connection with, we certainly didn't.
The experience eventually became another post on the site, partly because that's what I've always done here: document things that happen to us, especially when what we learned might help someone else.
It's also a reminder that when I look back at our old houses, I don't just remember paint colours, renovations and where the furniture went.
- I remember what happened while we lived there.
- The good stuff.
- The ridiculous stuff.
- And occasionally the stuff we'd rather not repeat.
Adam Sooley
Becoming part of Greely
It was also during these years that Greely became more than simply the place where we happened to own a house, it became our community.
I became involved with the Greely Community Association, first as Vice-President and later as President. That meant community meetings, events, working with residents and dealing with the issues that come with a growing rural community.
It also meant working with municipal, provincial and federal representatives and getting to know a lot more of the people around us, but more importantly, it made us feel connected to Greely and gained a lot of great friends in the process.
So when the time eventually came to move again in 2021, we didn't actually want to leave the community, we just wanted another house.
Which explains what happened next.
Looking back, that house represents a very specific chapter of our lives. We arrived with a three-year-old and a new born on the way and we left with two school-aged girls.
In between were seven years of birthdays, Christmases, school mornings, family trips, renovations, community events, ridiculous videos, unexpected health scares and ordinary days that didn't seem particularly important until they were gone.
And that's probably what makes a house a home, it's everything that happened around it. In 2021, it was finally time for another chapter, but we weren't going very far.
Greely... again: 2021 to present
By 2021, we'd been in Greely for seven years. We loved the community, the girls had grown up here, we'd made friends and Greely very much felt like home. So when it came time to move again, we didn't actually want to leave. We just wanted a different house and apparently a much longer to-do list.
In 2021, we moved into our third house overall and our second in Greely. It gave us more space, a different property and another place for the girls to grow up. It also came with more than its fair share of repairs, a lot more.
In hindsight, perhaps the house was simply excited to meet me and had prepared a list of projects in advance.
Welcome home. Here's your to-do list.
Every house needs maintenance, this one apparently wanted to get several decades' worth out of the way at once.
Since moving in, we've:
- Replaced the windows and doors.
- We've put on a new roof.
- We've worked on the water system.
- We've installed a full fence around the property.
- We've done a complete landscaping redo.
- We've installed a pool.
- I've completely made over my home office.
And those are just the projects I'm remembering, there always seems to be something else. Some of the work was planned, some of it was something we knew would need to be done, and some of it was the house's way of saying: Hey Adam, got any plans this weekend?
The ongoing transformation since 2021. Apparently buying the house was merely the admission fee.
Making it ours
As much work as this house has been, there's something satisfying about looking back at what it looked like when we moved in compared with today. Piece by piece, we've made it ours.
- The new windows and doors changed both the look and efficiency of the house.
- The roof was one of those projects that nobody gets particularly excited about paying for, but you're very happy to have finished.
- The water system was part of learning the joys of rural home ownership.
- The fence transformed the property.
- The landscaping continues to evolve.
- And the pool has become part of our summers at home.
Of course, completing one project usually means I can finally see the next three, home ownership is excellent that way.
But houses aren't really about houses
With all the repairs and projects, it would be easy to remember the last few years by roofs, windows, landscaping and renovation bills but just like our first Greely house, that's not really what this chapter has been about.
The biggest change has been happening inside the house. The girls have kept growing up, again, considerably faster than I authorized.
When we moved here in 2021, Paige was ten and Sadie was seven, now they're teenagers and I'm still not entirely sure how that happened.
2021 versus 2026. Apparently houses aren't the only things that change quickly.
Watching them grow up
This house has been different from the previous two because we're now watching the girls enter a completely different stage of their lives. The baby years are long gone, so are the little-kid years. Now there are sports and activities, friends, concerts, school events and increasingly independent lives.
- They've joined us for concerts.
- Our family trips have changed.
- Our conversations have changed.
- Even the things we do together have changed.
It's one of those transitions that happens slowly enough that you don't really notice it from day to day. Then you look at a photo from when you moved into the house in 2021 and think, that was only five years ago? And that's probably what I'll remember most about this house someday.
- Not the new roof.
- Not the windows.
- Not the fence.
- Not all the other reno's.
It'll be the years when Paige and Sadie went from kids to teenagers.
- The ringette games.
- The Highland dance performances.
- The volleyball.
- The concerts.
- The vacations.
- The summers around the pool.
- The ordinary nights at home.
All the stuff that doesn't seem particularly historic while it's happening. until suddenly it is.
When we bought our first house in Riverside South in 2006, I thought owning a home was mostly about having a place that belonged to us.
Three houses later, I think about it a little differently: Riverside South was where we started, our first Greely house was where our girls spent their earliest years growing up, this Greely house is where we're watching them become who they're going to be.
The houses are just the backdrop. The good stuff is everything that happens inside them, although I still would've preferred to skip the legionnaires.
And somewhere throughout all of those things so far, I've kept blogging.
Technology has always been there
I started this website back in 1994 and built many others over the years. There wasn't much to the Internet back then, and there certainly wasn't Ghost, Drupal, or any other content management system that would magically build a website for you. You wrote HTML, usually badly, and you were extremely proud when you figured out how to make text blink.
At one point I owned AdamSooley.com, but I stopped maintaining things for a while and managed to lose the domain and eventually AdamSooley.ca became home which was probably more appropriate anyway. The .ca started ~2010 as did the tagline: Boring one person at a time!
Some of the old sites that I built or was involved with. Fun fact: Lyric~net was once the most popular music site on the internet.
Taking back my digital life
Technology has always been a big part of my life, but lately I've found myself going back to what probably attracted me to computers in the first place: Figuring out how things work and doing things myself. That's why I've become increasingly interested in self-hosting.
My unRaid server now runs a growing collection of the services our family uses:
- Photos.
- Files.
- Home automation.
- Security cameras.
- Media.
- Recipes.
- Websites.
- DNS.
- Backups.
And probably something else I installed last week and have already forgotten about.
Where it makes sense, I want our data on hardware that I own and control, and, where possible, I like supporting Canadian companies and keeping our digital lives here in Canada.
So what ends up on this website?
Pretty much anything I'm interested in.
- Technology and self-hosting.
- Home projects and DIY.
- Money, investing and finding ways to save a few dollars.
- Travel.
- Newfoundland.
- Family adventures.
- Concerts.
- Things I've fixed.
- Things I've broken while attempting to fix something else.
And occasionally something completely random because I felt like writing about it. I don't pretend to be an expert on everything I write about. Most of the time I'm simply documenting what worked for me, what didn't, what I learned and what I'd do differently next time.
If something here saves somebody a few dollars, fixes a problem, gives them an idea or simply gives them a laugh, then the site has done its job.
So who am I?
After all of that, I'm still basically the same guy from Newfoundland who likes figuring things out.
- I'm a husband to Jodi.
- A dad to two girls.
- A Newfoundlander living in Ottawa.
- A technology guy.
- A homeowner who occasionally believes YouTube has qualified him as a tradesperson.
- A community volunteer.
- A concertgoer.
- A traveller.
- A self-hoster.
- A person who spends entirely too much time automating things that could have been accomplished by simply standing up and flipping a switch.
- And, apparently, a blogger.
Most importantly, I'm someone who's been fortunate enough to build a pretty great life with some pretty great people around me and this website is simply where I document bits and pieces of it. Some useful, some personal, some technical, and some exceptionally boring.
Boring one person at a time!