I moved

Both physically and on the internet.

Physically I went to Ireland for 6 months which was quite an interesting experience. I lived in the beautiful little town of Carrick-on-Shannon, about 2/3 of the way between Dublin and Sligo.

The thing that will stay with me the most was the absolute lack of running infrastructure when leaving any town, the roads are built for cars, not for bikes nor for runners. I’ll discuss this soon in a video on YouTube however, as I’d like to dive a bit deeper on the matter of goals, curiosity, and long-term health benefits.

Other than that, it was really nice to disconnect for a while from being in a larger city. Living next to a river, with beautiful green rolling hills nearby, gives you a sense of freedom, and each breath feels cleaner, more fulfilling.

That said, I moved back to Belgium a few months ago, new place, new mindset. It is weird moving from a house to an apartment; you lose the sense of “I can yell at any time and it’s all going to be fine” and replace it with “I should probably lower my voice, the neighbors might get mad”; yet at times you are surprised with another fierce sensation of “Will you stop it with the noise already?” as well as the every-so-slightly-infuriating “where is that smell coming from?!?”.

Challenges, everywhere we go.

Incidentally, on the internet I also moved. After having this blog hosted for nearly 2 decades on Startlogic; they tried to bump the price yet again after being acquired by web.com, in the past few years it went from around 120 USD/year, to 220, and now about 300 after taxes. In a world where you can host static websites for free, it makes no sense. Thus I foray into the world of Jekyll on Github Pages.

In any case, I plan on posting here every now and then; I’ve been very lax with keeping this blog up to date. But as it is now in Markdown, and a git push away, it makes things slightly easier to maintain.