For twenty years I’ve been promising to take him to Germany, so we ended up choosing Munich. The Snook decided to come along with me, and we figured we deserved a few days of actual vacation at the end of it. Last November I was invited to speak at Build Stuff conference in Vilnius and Kiev, my first ever European tech conferences. Everything is slightly weird and scary and uncomfortable (even disregarding a little thing like a GLOBAL PANDEMIC), and it occurred to me I should probably start documenting this stuff again.

Yesterday the Snook and I arrived in Munich, Germany, which will be our home for the foreseeable future. (“When did we go to Hawaii? Let me look it up on the blog…”)īut now, twenty years on, we go back to the beginning, back to expat life. Truthfully, I use it more for historical reference now than anything else. But then expat life became just “life,” and the Internet moved away from websites to social networks, and gradually the blog just became a repository, a place where some of the detritus of my digital life would maybe wind up. For the first five years – which, let’s be honest, were the only years anyone cared about blogs – whenever anyone would ask me why I had one, I’d say that it was because I was an expat and it was a way to share my life with family overseas. This blog will be twenty years old next month.

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