Turns out I somehow missed my normal “In Review” for 2016. ’16 was a very good year for me overall with a new job, an amazing trip to Japan, the best family Christmas I could have ever asked for, and countless little moments with friends and family. It was an overall great year.
2017 by contrast? Not as universally great. This year was an absolute “mixed bag” of good and bad. There wasn’t a plan of any sort going into the year, but if there had been, I probably would have missed it on all points as 2017 didn’t really play by anyone’s rules.
Travel
With a big two-week trip to Japan in fall 2016, our travel plans were scaled back significantly from previous years. The one big exception being our trip to Denmark for the LEGO Inside Tour.
Denmark
Finally made it to a Nordic country in October to visit Billund, home of the LEGO Group, creator of all things LEGO, the toy brick that defined my childhood in so many ways. Through blind luck, I managed to get two spots on the LEGO Inside Tour to get a 3-day in-depth behind the scenes tour of LEGO. It was awesome. More on that later.Barcelona
This one’s easy. I was in Barcelona often enough for work trips, I extended one by a few days and flew Elisa out as well. We had a very nice long weekend in one of our favorite cities in the world.
England
We made several visits to London this year to see friends. Most notably for my niece’s birthdays in March, another short trip in October when an old high school friend was nearby, and again for Christmas where we made a trip into the city to see Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park and the Natural History Museum. While in England I also got to see my first ever Christmas Pantomime, which was spectacular and impossible to adequately describe to anyone who hasn’t seen one before.
Professional
This year is marked by a lot of unexpected/unplanned growth professionally. It’s been the single most challenging year of my professional career to-date, and it has set up a lot of very interesting (and daunting) new challenges for 2018.
Studio Lead
When I joined GameHouse in 2016, the plan from the start was I would spend 2-ish years as Producer, working hand-in-hand with Dan (my 3-time boss now) as Studio Director to gradually build up experience to fill the role when he would likely move on to a new job. Unfortunately circumstances changed rather abruptly (but not for any bad reasons!) and Dan needed to move back to the US this past summer. This left me to take over leadership of the team fully and formally just 6 months into the 2 year plan. While not my first team to lead by far, it is my first studio team trying to ship products (I’ve led operations teams in the past), and a team that has faced rather unique challenges of its own. It’s been a trial by fire, and probably one of the single most intense learning periods of my career. I’ve had my share of mis-steps, but I’ve finally started to make the role truly my own in the last few months. I’ve got a lot ahead of me in 2018, and it excites me.Commute from Hell
Ok, it turns out that spending 3 hours every day on the train commuting to/from work is not sustainable for me at all. In total, I’ve spent nearly 29 full days, or an additional 82 working days (693 hours) of 2017 sitting on a train going to or coming home from work. This is an average and doesn’t take into account days where delays or cancellations turned my normal 1.5 hour one-way commute into a 4 hour commute. This leaves me exhausted when I get home, means I have to get up extremely early every morning, and I have pretty much 0 time to relax/wind down at home aside from weekends. If we have any overtime work nights, or events that mean I need to stay later at the office (or stay overnight) this cuts down even further into what little non-work time I have during the week. And it usually comes at the expense of sleep.
Personal
Very Little Down Time
From the commute point above, I’ve had very little good down-time this year. I pretty much have to cram all recuperation into weekends, which are often at least partially filled with other activities. It’s made it very difficult to recharge my batteries this year when I’m feeling particularly drained. When I am at home with nothing to go and do, I’ve basically been a silent lump in a chair trying to not think too hard. This hasn’t really been fair or fun for Elisa either, who has had to pick up a lot of the slack this year.
Illness
I think as a direct result, I’ve been sick a lot more this year than I have in pretty much my entire life so far. In April I got hit by the one-two punch of the flu and then pneumonia. I was effectively bed-ridden for a full month, and took at least another month after that to really regain my strength. And beyond that, I’ve picked up some virus or another at least once a month all year, leaving me to spend my precious weekend or evening hours just trying to sleep it off. Hell, I’m sick right now as I type this, with my third box of tissues opened next to me. My lack of rest, the long commute, and an increased demand from work have all sort of conspired to create the perfect target for any passing virus.
LEGO Inside Tour
But it’s not all been bad! Like I mentioned earlier, I got to go on the LEGO Inside Tour in October. The LIT is a special limited availability 2.5 day tour that you have to sign up for a lottery for to get a CHANCE at a spot. They do 5 tours a year of 35 people per tour. Thousands apply every year, so getting in takes some folks years of trying. We signed up last fall for this year’s tours, and got an initial e-mail saying “Sorry, but you were not selected”, which was totally expected and fine. Then about 2 weeks later I got a follow-up email saying “Hey, someone dropped out of the tour for this year, and you are next on the list. Still interested?” HELL YES!! So in late October we flew to Billund, Denmark for an intense 2.5 days of behind-the-scenes LEGO goodness at the company’s HQ. We met with professional set designers, element designers and engineers. Took tours of the factory and saw individual LEGO bricks being made. Got to tour “The Vault” where they keep copies of every single commercially released set going back to the 1960s. Did a building challenge where we had access to every single element in the standard set, and set designers moving around the room to help out (i.e. the best possible building experience you could have). And oh so much more. It really rekindled my love of LEGO that had been somewhat dormant for the last 10 or so years. It was an absolute once-in-a-lifetime sort of thing.
Cats!
The last time I had a cat was early 2011 before I moved to Texas. After 5 years at Stardock, I knew life was about to get way less predictable, so instead of subjecting my cat to numerous, massively stressful moves (she never dealt well with any change) I gave her to my parents, where she’s had a lovely and stable life since (and will likely until the end). So it had been roughly 6 years without a pet, and the first time without one at all since I was probably around 8 years old. So, with our life in the Netherlands looking stable, I finally gave in to Elisa’s request to get a pet. She spotted a group of kittens posted to a Facebook expat group in our town, sent me the photo, I said yes and 2 days later we had two kittens, brothers. Enter: Waldorf & Statler (yes, named after the Muppet characters). They’ve been a wonderful source of stress relief in a stressful year and I’m so glad we got them. Easily 90% of my photos on Facebook now are of the cats doing something ridiculous.
2018…
What does 2018 hold? Hard to say in the overall. We have no specific travel plans for the year yet, and there are a few big question marks about what work will hold, so any sort of prediction will be pointless. But, there are a few concrete things I do KNOW we will be doing by the end of the year…
Moving
The commute is too much. Combined with our current landlord putting the house up for sale, we need to move by March, so this is the push I needed to find a place to live much closer to work. If I can get my commute down to 30 minutes each way, my life will immediately improve!
Dutch Lessons
We’ve been here four years now, and I know about 10 words of Dutch. It’s a bit of an embarrassment really. Plus I need to reach A2 level in the language so I can test and apply for…Permanent Residency
After five years, I can apply for a permanent residency permit. This will allow me to live in the Netherlands even without an active work contract. This is a big deal as in my current situation, if I lose or leave my job, I have 3 months to find a new job that will sponsor my visa, or I have to leave the country. That’s a big risk hanging over our heads. Getting that permanent visa is a BIG deal. This isn’t full citizenship though and I still won’t have a Dutch passport. To get that I’d have to renounce my US citizenship, and that’s not a step I’m willing to take. But this would give us a lot more security, and make it more possible to do something like buy a house here in the Netherlands.
Technically our 5 year mark is in November of 2018, so that’s when we can start the process. Chances are high that it wouldn’t complete until 2019, but this is where we’ll likely start it.
Potential US Trip
We last went back to the US in spring, 2015, largely because any US trip means a minimum of 2 weeks, and around $2,400 in flights for two people (international + a domestic flight) to cover both sides of the family. At the moment we’re tentatively planning a return visit in the fall. We’ll see how that works with our budget for the year…
So that’s a wrap on 2017. Some good, some bad. The general exhaustion was a sort of emotional wet blanket on the whole year. I’m hoping the move closer will help take pressure off in the right spots to let me make 2018 another great year like 2014-2016 were!