So, I’ve wrapped up work in Sydney, and took a single flight Sydney -> Wellington on April 28th!
The next 12 months I’ll enjoy my first sabbatical and I’m excited! My biggest fear is wasting my time and realising
the year is over and feel like I did not use the time wisely. How many people are blessed enough to have a year off?
After spending a few months wrapping up work, talking to friends and making a list of things I want to accomplish. I was
ready to start kicking butt on my list of amazing things to do.
However, while reading through Reboot Your Life
, actually taking that last flight, and talking to my partner I decided chilling out is important too.
Hence, I took the time that I’m still on leave and employed by Atlassian, as a not-quite-standard-but-still a holiday.
I’ve been using it to sort out mundane but important basics like getting an IRD number, arranging health insurance,
rest up from a year plus of weekly roundtrips between Sydney and Wellington -scaling 2 hours of timezone difference,
at times 10 degrees of
of temperature and long days with a full day in the office after a crazy early morning flight.
I’ve also used it to get a head start on setting up some of the projects that are part of that year list but take a
little preparation and time:
- Set myself up for productivity by creating a Trello board to manage my
projects in the house, and my sabbatical. I’ve got three boards up: one for house projects, shared with my partner, one
dedicated to my sabbatical, and one to study work done as part of Open Source Society University,
a clone of the OSSU Trello board.
- Started creating space for my firstborn; Painted the new bedroom we are building inside of the current living room.
We still have enough room to comfortably fit a normal dining table, book case and comfortable lounge area with sizable
couch. Could not have gotten away with that in my old 65 m2 apartment in Amsterdam..
- Got things set up to start growing 2 vegetable patches, next steps: fetching the soil, and start growing! Currently
blocked on finishing up the chicken coop and run.
- Ordered 4 chickens, cleared out space in the garden behind my shed and office space, and got started on my first “real”
DIY project: building a chicken coop. Next: building the fence.
- Met up with a financial advisor to make sure we’ve got the financial aspects all sorted.
- Ordered an Arduino kit, and started attending a hardware hacking workshop that runs forth nightly. This sets me up to
get more out of one of my goals: exploring IoT and robotics.
- Acquired a beer brewing kit, and started my first batch of home brew beer. The yeast is converting sugars into alcohol
behind me as I type this.
- Set up this blog, which I’ll post about soon. Spoiler alert; it’s a statically generated website using Hugo, deployed
from Travis, served by Github Pages.
- Caught up with my friends at Library For All, a charity I used to help out, and it
looks like I’ll be donating some more of my time to get children across the globe access to books!
Watch this space or subscribe to my mailing list below to get updates on my sabbatical, I’ll be using it to keep friends
up to date and keep myself honest -and from navel gazing in my shed.