Sometime before 8 p.m. on July 18, 2000, I saw a bright-yellow canola field in southeastern Manitoba disappear in my rear-view mirror as I drove eastward on the Trans-Canada Highway. A few hours later, I would arrive in Kenora, Ont. where I would spend the night, but to me, seeing the last of that canola field meant I had already seen the last of the West.

That was a wistful moment.

At about 5 p.m. on July 21, after stops in Marathon and Sudbury, I would enter Toronto's city limits on the 400 -- just in time for a Friday rush hour! Woohoo!! :)

That would mean about a few weeks ago, I passed the eight-year mark in the Toronto phase of my life. This is the longest I've lived in any one place as a post-university-graduation adult (during the tumultous 1996-2000 period, I had called five different cities home -- depending on how you counted). All of it was lived west of the Saskatchewan-Manitoba border.

Sometime in the first few months of my stay here, I was having a beer at a little joint downtown.

"You're not from around here, are you?" the bartender asked (not in an unkindly way).

Why? The accent. Apparently I have one.

I hadn't heard that since (at least, not to my face) until tonight.

"Are you from out West?" asked the concessions clerk at the movie with no name.

I was wearing a Haida art-themed t-shirt, and I thought she was referring to that, so I said from the West, but not the West Coast.

"From Alberta?" she asked.

"Yeah," I said. "Is that a problem?"

"Oh no," she said quickly. "It's just that you have a real Western accent."

She went on to say that she has a good ear for accents from all parts of Canada and that she once correctly identified someone as being from Milwaukee.

Hmmm. I'll try and cultivate that perpetually annoyed, unquestionably superior, faintly effete prep school whine that marks a certain class of Torontonians and see if I can fool her next time. :)

And for the hell of it, if you've never seen my re-write of Rednecks, White Socks and Blue Ribbon Beer, now's the time.